


lessons in mouse-catching

by foghornjazz



Series: nine lives [1]
Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Dubious Morality, Immortal Jaskier | Dandelion, Jaskier "i will cause problems on purpose", Jaskier | Dandelion Has a Past, M/M, Non-Human Jaskier | Dandelion, Past Child Abuse, Post-Canon, Post-Episode: S01E06 Rare Species, Pre-Relationship, Temporary Character Death, Witcher Jaskier | Dandelion, hand-wavy timeline, rescuing princesses (and Geralt) from towers, several times, the wholesale and horrible destruction of beloved musical instruments
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-12 13:06:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29510130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foghornjazz/pseuds/foghornjazz
Summary: They say cats have nine lives, but truthfully, Jaskier has long lost count of his.Jaskier has always been very good at playing pretend. It gets harder, after Geralt’s harsh words on the mountain. It gets harder still when he has to save a rogue Wolf and his Child Surprise from Nilfgaard’s gathering forces.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Jaskier | Dandelion & Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Series: nine lives [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2176308
Comments: 115
Kudos: 538





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> became obsessed with witcher!Jaskier and immortal!Jaskier and feral!Jaskier all at once, so attempted to write something featuring all three... bon appetit?
> 
> I did TRY to make this fit to some version of canon, and spent a lot of time with my good and wise friend, the Witcher wiki, but I’m not very smart and I couldn’t make it work so I gave up.
> 
> Do heed the tags! Warning for child death & child murder (it is not permanent but still nasty) and general witchery violence.

It is dark in the tavern, the air thick with smoke, the chatter of patrons rising thickly and a godawful bard crooning in the corner, but Julian smells him the minute he steps in. For one terribly long moment, he thinks it might be Geralt. His shoulders stiffen without him meaning to, stomach twisting into a knot — but it isn't Geralt. It just smells like him. The difference is subtle, but sure. The same whiff of cold mountain air, and leather-oil, but under that is another witcher, another horse.

The other witcher notices Julian the moment that Julian notices him. Yellow eyes meet across the heads of drunken villagers. It is a brown-haired man with one slim scar running from temple to chin, marring what would have once been a pleasant face. He looks rather young, Julian thinks, at least as young as Julian appears to be himself — though looks can deceive, for Julian is not very young at all. A wolf’s head medallion glimmers on the strange witcher's chest, over his armour, rising and falling slowly with his breath. That explains the smell, then.

Julian forgoes the bar entirely and strides over to the wolf witcher, smiling wide and just a little _too_ friendly. It isn’t something he often does now — make trouble — because —

Well. _Shovelling shit_ comes to mind.

— Because he doesn’t much like to draw attention to the fact that there is still a Mad Cat roaming the Continent. It has been well over twenty years since the sacking of the Caravan, well over twenty years since he was meant to have been killed, but Julian knows that one can never be too careful. He has slit his fair share of important throats, just as much as he has beheaded wyverns or impaled werewolves — and there is always the terrible, creeping fear that somebody might find out what he _is._ What he can, or more accurately, _cannot_ do. There are certainly crooked old sorcerers who would be keen to get their hands on a witcher who does not stay dead. Better to keep his head down and profile low, for more reason than one.

But he is _bored._

“And am I to take it that there isn’t any job for me here after all?” he asks, cocking his head to the side as he regards the strange witcher, who just snorts a little and takes another swig of ale. His eyes flicker over Julian’s own medallion, the cat's head frozen in a silvery snarl.

“Too slow, cat. I took out the nest of ghouls this morning.”

“Oh, what a pity,” Julian drawls. “There goes a good day’s honest work.”

The witcher regards him levelly, one corner of his thin mouth hooking up into a crooked smile. “I’m sure you’ll find dishonest work just as easy. Is that not what your kind are known for, pussycat? Or at least, it was, before you were all hunted down and slaughtered.”

Julian’s face splits into a wide, wide grin. “Surprised you didn’t mention the madness first. We remaining cats must have lost our touch.”

The witcher smirks, raising his hands in a mockery of conciliation. “Not asking for trouble,” he says, in a tone of voice that suggests that trouble is exactly what he is asking for.

Julian notices that the inn has fallen silent around them. They are drawing stares. He does not preen under the attention, like he once would have. He does not enjoy it.

The bard has stopped singing.

And, like it is so wont to do, his mood drops, sharply, and fast. Anger curls in his gut, familiar and hot. He sees red.

He sucks in a breath.

And he takes the unfamiliar witcher’s half-full flagon of ale and hurls it against the far wall, mere inches from the tuneless bard’s head. The tin of the cup is dented with the force of Julian's throw; the liquid spills sticky on the flagstones where it clatters to the floor.

He can smell the fear in the room, sickly and suffocating. Slower to come is the realisation, obvious though it might be, that they're afraid of _him._

His anger fades as quickly as it flared. He straightens up, looks the trembling bard in the eye, and says, “Your lyre is slightly out of tune. You should see to that.”

Then he turns back to the narrow-eyed wolf, who looks ready to pounce.

“Geralt of Rivia. The White Wolf,” he asks, before he can stop himself, before he can think twice. “Is he still alive?”

“Last I heard of him, yeah.” The wolf witcher rises to his feet in a slow, deliberate movement that Julian knows is meant to be intimidating — but Julian is older, Julian is faster, and Julian is madder. “But what the hell would a cat want with Geralt?”

Julian laughs — he can’t entirely help it. “Absolutely nothing,” he answers, truthfully. “I just really like the song.”

Nobody else laughs. That’s fair, considering that Julian is almost certain he’s the only one in the inn who gets the joke.

Glancing around the frozen, silent room, he flashes them all his most pleasant smile. “I’ll be on my way, then, since it looks like there isn't any work for me here after all.”

Then, without another word, he stalks out of the inn, saddles up Pegasus, ignoring his disgruntled nickering, and leaves town. Nobody comes after him, which is a great relief, loath as he is to admit it. The old lessons haven't faded; Julian knows well that Mad Cats get put down. Doesn't quite matter that Julian never _stays_ down; he's had enough of rebirth, had enough of changing his name and changing his skin. This is his life, this always _was_ his life, and maybe he’s just getting old, getting tired, but he can hardly bear the thought of having to start all over again. 

He had his years as Jaskier. But all nice dreams must come to an end.

* * *

Jaskier dies on the way down the mountain. Not literally, of course — dying is unpleasant, and as such he does it as little as he possibly can — but _metaphorically,_ when his beautiful, priceless, elven-made lute slips from his grasp and down a jagged ravine. He watches it fall; red-eyed, punch-drunk, raw. The latches on the case are knocked undone, the wood splinters over the rocks, the strings break with a horrid, discordant twang. Maybe there’s another metaphor in there somewhere, but truth be told, Jaskier is sick to death of poetry.

He can’t be sure, because he is feeling maddened with unhappiness, with— with _heartbreak —_ Geralt’s words echoing harshly in his ears, the world wavy around the edges the way it always is when he gets upset — but he thinks that maybe he let it fall. Or maybe he threw it. A dry, detached part of him thinks that that wouldn’t be so terribly out of character. Even before he was Jaskier _,_ he had something of a flair for drama.

(Standing in the shallows of the lake comes to mind. Shivering, clothes torn and eyes wide, lonely, frightened, looking quite pathetic and hoping the enormous, yellow-eyed man takes more pity on him than his icy mother would — but he does not care to think about that little boy now).

(He must have drowned a hundred times over in that lake, alone, six years old).

(Every single time, he came gasping back).

Now, toes curling in his boots, wrung-out where he stands and looks down at his broken lute, he feels all of the buried things grow teeth again. The fury that crowds everything else out; the hysteria that comes a little too sharp; the laugh that feels as though he’s swallowed a living thing desperate to crawl back up; all that wildness at the centre of him. Whistle in the ear, ache in the head, blood on the tongue. He itches to hold a sword again, fingers flexing at his sides, even when he has hardly touched a sword in two decades. The bard Jaskier doesn’t know how to throw a dagger, swing a sword, behead a barghest, garrot a man from behind and gut him from the front — but the mad cat Julian could never forget.

At the edge of that ravine, Julian shakes all the music out of his limbs. Jaskier was fluid, every step halfway to a dance, expressive and open. Julian is a coiled spring, sharp-toothed, hidden venom. He is the flicker of a tail in warning, languid and relaxed and lazy until somebody blinks and he is none of those things. Jaskier is gone, dead, done. Julian is furious and bitter, one of the last of his kind, and when he licks his lips, he is hungry.

* * *

“Alright, little mouser,” says Gaetan. He sets Julian down in the corner of the room. It is some way yet to the Dyn Mawr Caravan, and he may as well get the little scamp started. “What is the first thing a kitten learns to do?”

Gaetan is not very old. He has not yet been on the Path for a decade. He still remembers all the old lessons, remembers how much bigger the world felt when you were four feet tall, how a dagger seemed as long as a sword, and a real sword much too heavy to carry. He still remembers, though it is distant and dim, teaching his sister how to peel potatoes; how to curve the blade away from her fingers, how to guide it to a stop against the pad of her thumb. Sharper is better. Sharper is safer, much as it seems that the opposite ought to be true.

Julian’s disconcerting blue eyes meet his. “Catch a mouse?”

“Exactly.”

“Is that why you called me a mouser?”

Gaetan smiles. A rare thing. “Sharp ears and a keen mind will serve you well, kitten. But you are a little bigger than a housecat, and we are hunting for something a little bigger than a mouse. Come, and put those sharp ears to use.”

Julian is just a snot-nosed child chewing on a stale corner of bread in the gloom of the tavern, another gap-toothed urchin, skin-and-bone raggamuffin who kicks out his feet on the too-tall stool. Nobody pays him any heed, least of all the group of merchants who have enlisted Gaetan’s assistance in ridding the town of its corrupt mayor. He hears every word of their plan to ambush the yellow-eyed witcher and put him down for good — only _after_ he has fulfilled his contract on the mayor, of course.

The Mayor offers Gaetan quite a bit more coin to rid the town of the merchants than the other way around. Cats are loyal only to those who feed them; so it goes.

The two of them leave the town in the dead of night, before anyone knows what has been done, with pockets jangling. Blood splatters the witcher’s armour and there is a ragamuffin sat atop his shoulders, swinging a dead mouse by its tail.

* * *

After the Cull, and long into his first decade on the Path, whispers follow Julian of Kerack. Cat witchers have never been too discerning with their loyalties, nor with their tongues. Fortunately for Julian, what they whisper is such a stark impossibility that it makes all who hear it snort out a laugh.

There are plenty of tall tales about witchers, but none so patently false as this: that there is a Cat with nine lives, that there is a Cat who cannot die.

When they laugh, Julian joins in.

* * *

Julian Alfred Pancratz is born on the most ordinary of days in the most extraordinary of circumstances. First is the fact that — up until she collapses in a field of dandelions under a bright and buttery springtime sun, her abdomen suddenly swollen, her smallclothes suddenly soaked — his mother had not been pregnant at all. Second, is that the baby — a wonderfully hideous, wrinkly, screeching, newborn baby boy, a little on the small side, but perfectly normal, perfectly made — opens eyes as startlingly blue as the cloudless sky that vaults overhead. None of the colourless grey-blue of the newborn. These are the eyes of something inhuman, something enchanted, something cursed.

There are several kinds of unlikely children in the world. The child of blessing: an impossibility, a gift, born or given to parents who had yearned yet never expected their wishes would be fulfilled. And then there is the child of surprise: destiny’s plaything, an unexpected bounty, or an unlikely burden. And, most unfortunate of all, there are the cursed children: a child bestowed upon parents who never wanted it, a child born only to destroy, whether they have a mind to or not.

Julian Alfred Pancratz’s mother had not been pregnant, because she had not _wanted_ to be pregnant. They had little patience for children, the Viscount and the Viscountess — squalling, shitting, stupid little things, requiring a lot of effort for very little reward. The Viscount did not care to acquire an heir; his brother had a son, and the Viscount was happy to pass along the title to a child that was not his own. So they had not planned on a baby, had no desire for one, but they are unpleasant people, and unpleasant people reap what they sow. They had been warned, and they had not listened; they cut down the hawthorn tree in the grounds to plant a flower garden; they kicked the toadstools of the faery ring to pieces; they picked the entire blackberry crop in the autumn and left behind none for those to whom the remains of the crop were owed — and the tricksy people they had insulted know precisely how best to punish them.

They had not been expecting a baby — had taken several measures against it, in fact — but a baby is what they get. And he _is_ theirs, no doubt about that. He has his father’s nose, and his mother’s mouth, and his grandfather’s soft brown hair, touched by honey in sunlight and bearing the slightest wave when tossed by the breeze. Only his eyes mark him out as something unusual, as something cursed, as a changeling of some kind — but his parents are wise enough not to claim to family, friends and subjects that something so innocuous as the birth of a baby could be a faery curse.

Yet the fact remains that they do not want him.

When Julian is only an infant, he is dropped on his head; fumbled by his mother, poor thing, unused to holding a baby, and Julian has always been a rather squirmy one. Nothing to be done. A terrible hush descends over the nursery as the baby’s cries fall silent.

Only for them to start up again a scant few seconds later. According to the maid, he must have bounced. Babies are extraordinarily resilient things.

When Julian is two, he suffers a terrible fever, a sepsis of the blood. Nothing to be done. Nobody knows where Julian has managed to catch it; no child has died of the plague in the area for many years. It takes him within the week, his calm, dry-eyed parents sitting either side of him as he draws his last rattling breath in the middle of the night, their black mourning clothes already cleaned and pressed and laid out to be put on.

Only for Julian to wake, a little groggy, but quite well, the very next morning, barely in time for the news of the child’s untimely death to be revoked.

When Julian is four, he has an accident. In the stables, where he shouldn't be, with the horses, where he shouldn't be. One knows what children are like. Nothing to be done; the filly is wild and unbroken. She backs him into the side of the stable, he suffers a blow to the head, he is crushed. He is gone by the time the stable hand comes across him, blue eyes blank and hollow, one small hand outstretched. 

The stable hand who finds him, who is holding his little body the minute he jerks back to life with a cough and a groan, is dismissed. Nobody dares comment on the single swatch of straw that still clings to the Viscount’s fine velvet doublet, the faint smell of the stables about his hair. Julian is cranky and sore after his ordeal, so he is put to bed. He mends within the hour, the blood that had stained his temple wiped away to reveal smooth skin, a fatal wound now naught but a small silver scar.

When he is six, Julian disappears; goes to wander in the estate, too close to the lake, where a horde of drowners have taken hold. They give it a week, the Viscount de Lettenhove and his wife, just to be safe, until a yellow-eyed witcher passes through Kerack. The Viscount and his wife, doing their best to appear bereft, enlist his help — for much as the drowners had rid them of a pest, it simply will not do to have monsters running wild in their estate. The witcher knows the little boy is dead if he has been gone a week — he would have been likely dead had he only been missing half an hour — but he promises to rid them of their infestation anyway.

* * *

The boy is not dead.

After disposing of the drowners, one severed head already strapped to his horse, Gaetan crouches low to wipe his sword off on the scraggly snatches of long grasses that grow on the banks of the lake. He hears splashing, tastes the shift in the breeze. Sword already raised, he turns with a snarl, expecting he has missed a straggler or two in his killing frenzy.

It is not a drowner. It is a boy, soaked to the bone, his waterlogged clothes torn, trembling. In the moonlight, bleached down to white and black and silver, he looks half-human, half-shadow. Wide blue eyes meet narrowed yellow. For a moment, Gaetan is convinced the boy is a ghost — there can be no other explanation for it — until he hears the hummingbird-thrum of the boy’s heart in his chest, and sees the blue tinge to his lips. He is human, he is alive, and he is cold.

“Are the monsters all gone?” the boy whispers.

Gaetan has not seen his sister since he was a boy, but he is a brother still; the one sentiment life on the Path has not yet managed to rob him of. On instinct, he catches the strange, impossible boy as he trips and collapses forward, finding him light as air, fragile as a kitten between his hands. Gaetan wraps him in his cloak to warm his bones and quell his trembling, and sets him upon his horse. Then, he walks them both back to the house at the other end of the estate, where the lights twinkle warmly at the windows, and where he does not realise there is no love to be found.

He expects delight. Disbelief, of course, but largely delight. The boy had — somehow — lived, and while Gaetan might be a witcher, an assassin, a half-mad Cat, he is not heartless. There are glimmers of real joy to be found in this thankless, lonely Path. Reuniting a lost child with his parents is one of them.

The Viscount and Viscountess are dismayed.

Of course, they do their best to hide it. They smile through clenched teeth, stiffly embrace their silent, shivering boy — but Gaetan is not merely a witcher, he is a _Cat_ witcher; a spy, a thief, a shadow, as accustomed to manipulating men as he is to slaying monsters. He knows the taste of insincerity on his own tongue as well as he knows how it looks on the tongues of others. The maid is happier to see the boy than his parents are; Gaetan just can’t quite understand _why_ — not that the reason matters, in the end. He is no noble Wolf, Bear, or Griffin; he takes contracts on both men and beasts and does not ask questions. People love to have reasons for wanting somebody else dead, but none of them are very convincing, and Gaetan quickly grows sick of hearing them.

The maid laughs, claps her hands together, tucks the cloak more firmly around Julian, and remarks, “Oh, you certainly do have nine lives, young Master Julian!”

“Yes,” says the Viscountess thinly, “he certainly does.”

“Cut the payment in half,” says Gaetan, in a split second fit of kindness, or madness, or a funny blend of both, “and give me the boy.”

A beat of silence in the resplendent hall, fire merry in the grate, maid struck dumb, shivering little boy looking up at him with those startlingly blue eyes.

A muscle in the Viscount de Lettenhove’s jaw twitches. “A quarter of the agreed sum, and the child is yours.” His wife does not object. His maid sucks in a shocked breath.

Gaetan had a sister, once. Gaetan might be dooming the boy to a painful death in the Cat School, where half are killed by the trials, and the remainder halved again by the Cull, but Gaetan knows the child is dead if he stays here. There will be other lakes, other drowners, other fevers and other stables. At the very least, he can give this little boy a chance to slay his own monsters.

“Done,” he says.

“Do not speak of this to anyone,” says the Viscountess to the maid. “Julian is dead; he drowned in the lake. Do you understand?”

White-lipped, the maid nods.

“Mama?” Julian asks, voice hoarse and tremulous, still wrapped in Gaetan’s cloak.

“Go with the man, now, Julian,” says the Viscountess, brisk and businesslike. “Go with the witcher, and do what he tells you. You’ll be good, won’t you, Julian? You’ll be good.”

* * *

Julian is not very good. At least, not at the beginning.

He tries — if trying were any measure, he’d have outpaced the best boy in the caravan ten times over — but despite being scrappy, he simply does not take very well to fighting. Killing a mouse is drastically different to killing a person, and while Julian starts his spars off well, he often falters before delivering the final blow, even with wooden practice swords, even with no real stakes and no real threat beyond a couple of cuts and bruises. He favours evasion over attack, and his open face and easy nature make him an easy target for the other boys’ jeers and taunts. More frustrating is the fact that he never shuts up; he is always asking questions, pestering even old Gezras for stories of fearsome monsters, and entirely impossible to dissuade once he has fixated upon something. He likes to sing under his breath during his chores, and in every new city the caravan ventures near, Julian always finds a way to skive off training and slip into the libraries, a filthy street urchin with a dagger strapped to his back, scandalising the librarians when they spot his dirty nose buried in one of their precious old books. His one saving grace, as far as his superiors are concerned, is that he is very, very hard to catch, by both frustrated witcher and furious librarian alike.

Gaetan takes him to the caravan, passes him to Guxart, and takes off on the Path again. He does not once mention the child's miraculous survival in the lake of the Lettenhove estate. If Julian harbours a strange fear of water for a long time afterwards, that is not so unusual for a Cat. His odd ability does not come to bear during those early years, for while the Cat School is tough, they do not make a habit of killing their candidates. Not before the trials, at least.

When Julian looks back on those early years, with the caravan, the other candidates — mostly boys like him, though there was the occasional half-elf and a vicious girl or two — shuffled from city to city, sleeping and eating and training under the stars, he will think that it must have been when he was happiest.

Of course, the other boys are often horrible to him, but Julian is no longer the son of a Viscount and he is not above biting his enemies. The verbal bullying, too, is short-lived, because Julian is remarkably skilled at being an exceptional annoyance to those he dislikes. Nobody is able to tolerate the consequences of being cruel to him for long. He even makes a friend or three — Desdemona, Joël, a spry quarter-elf called Borys — though whether they are actually his friends by choice or if he kidnapped them into friendship with him by sheer force of personality, is never entirely clear. It doesn’t matter. Borys is killed by the trials, Desdemona by the cull, and Joël survives the sacking of the Caravan only to be hunted down like a dog a short while later.

He thinks those were his happiest years, the years before he was mutated by the trials, the years in which he was most like _himself_ — until the Caravan he grew up in has long since burned to the ground, and he spends twenty more trailing after Geralt of Rivia, irritating as a bad smell and just as difficult to get rid of. Imagine: a cat lovesick over a wolf. Laughable even before the ill-fated Witcher Tournament in Kaedwen, and stupid to the point of insanity afterwards — even if Jaskier had once been the Maddest Cat of all.

* * *

Gaetan is there when they carry Julian into the infirmary after the Trial of the Grasses; a makeshift affair conducted in the dungeons of a long-abandoned keep, the nomadic Cat School having found no other suitable location. 

He is still alive. 

It is a surprise that Julian lived, but not an unwelcome one. Gaetan doesn’t know if it is true that witchers in the other schools have no emotions where the Cats have too many, but he is relieved, no matter the reason, that the child he brought to the School has lived where so many others have not. Julian is worse for wear — a heaving chest, dark hair plastered to his skull with sweat, his fingers twisting still in the rags of his clothing — but he is through the worst of it. He will live. He is barely conscious where they lay him on the cot, his wrists and ankles rubbed raw by the shackles he’d been strapped into, his eyes a narrow strip of greenish-yellow, that startlingly bright blue banished forever. But the mutagens took, and he will live.

The trials unique to the School of the Cat are renowned for heightening the candidates’ emotions, not dulling them. If five out of every ten boys survive the mutations, two or three of those five must be culled for being too unstable, too unpredictable, too mad. Gaetan is relieved that Julian survived, of course, but he is never one to count his blessings before they have been delivered. He squeezes the boy’s narrow shoulder as Julian finally succumbs to sleep, and, against all wisdom, hopes.

When Julian opens his yellow eyes a day later, and grins a bloodstained red grin, and tries to kill Treyse with his bare hands, there is nothing to be done. He calms down, comes back to himself, has the wherewithal to be ashamed, to apologise to Treyse with a voice that is hoarse, that trembles. It doesn’t matter, of course, because the agony of the trials have frayed his sanity down to a single thread, and there is no guarantee he won’t snap. He is too mad to let live, too dangerous to keep. There is simply nothing to be done.

Gaetan offers to kill him himself. Julian knows him and trusts him; he taught Julian how to hold a sword, how to catch a mouse. And Gaetan can make Julian’s end quick, if nothing else. He thinks he owes the boy that.

* * *

“That is disgusting, Geralt,” Jaskier says, primly, as Geralt flicks a bit of kikimore gore onto his lovely ocean-blue pantaloons.

They are walking back to the inn, the offending kikimore’s head strapped to Roach’s saddle. It is getting bright; sunlight leaches ink from the horizon. They might sleep all day after the night they had. Or, the night Geralt had had. Jaskier was there for moral support and ballad research purposes only.

Geralt snorts a laugh. Jaskier scowls. “Really, why couldn’t I have been saddled with a witcher that cares about hygiene? I expect your ripe smell is half the reason for the world at large’s rather severe mistrust of your kind.”

“As opposed to stinking of — what is it, currently? Spiced orange?”

“Very good,” Jaskier says. “Glad to know your nose is discerning enough to pick out the notes of my perfume, but not quite enough to force you into a _bath.”_

Jaskier does not like Geralt to examine him too closely, though sometimes he has half-forgotten the reason why. Then he catches the movement of a spider on a beam overhead from the other end of the stable, or smells the coppery tang of blood downwind miles before they come upon the slaughter, or steps a little too fluidly out of the path of a wayward arrow, and he remembers. The glamour is good — Jaskier paid enough for it — but no glamour is perfect. In certain lights, the yellow underneath the blue of his eyes might bleed through enough to make them glimmer green. When it is quiet enough, he worries Geralt might hear a witcher’s slow, slow, slow heartbeat underneath a bard’s perfectly level sixty-five beats-per-minute calm, and a hundred and fifteen when panicked. But Geralt, for all that he is astute about certain things, is remarkably obtuse about others. When he looks at Jaskier, all he _expects_ to see is a foppish bard; that alone does more work than the strongest glamour ever could.

(It works the other way around, too. If Jaskier believes himself a mere bard — then mere bard is all he will be.)

“I’ll bathe this evening,” Geralt says suddenly, drawing Jaskier out of his thoughts. He gives Jaskier a yellow side-eyed glare. “Since you insisted upon it with such grace and tact.”

“I am exceedingly graceful, Geralt, thank you very much. I could have been a dancer. I am nimble as a cat.”

“You didn't even pretend to have tact. Very self-aware.”

“Yes, well, I’m not in the business of pretending to be something I’m not,” he lies, airily, gracefully, tactfully, a sour taste in his mouth, curling his tongue.

He does not like Geralt to examine him very closely; he fears Geralt will not like what he sees. But more than that, Jaskier does not like to examine _himself_ too closely. He has no doubt about what he will find, and even after decades and decades of wandering, he is still a simple man at heart; one who lives with the fear that his house of cards might someday soon collapse around his ears.

* * *

Julian comes back to himself with a ragged gasp; vision too sharp, even in the darkness, heart thundering in his chest, even if it is a strangely fractured, slow sort of thunder. Something heavy presses down on his ribs, crushing all the breath out of him. He manages to shove it aside, only to have Desdemona’s blank yellow stare flop into his field of vision. Her neck is a tangled mess of torn flesh; her last snarl is still written on her features. She’s dead, of course. He knows this, because so is he. Gaetan had come, and cupped the side of his face, and slipped his blade in between Julian’s ribs and into his heart before Julian had realised what he had done. He had held him, too, as he died. Gathered him close, and stroked his hair away from his eyes, as if he cared.

Julian knows how it goes. Mad Cats get put down.

He doesn’t remember being six years old all that well, but he remembers the lake. Dragging himself out of the water, only to be snatched back again. More vivid is the memory of the Trial, the fire that started in his eyes and burrowed its way down into his skull, that made all of his clothes pull and fray at his raw skin, that made his stomach revolt its very place in his gut. More vivid still is the memory of the red-haze fading, his hands still clasped around the older witcher’s throat. And, more vivid still, as if it were branded into his mind, is Gaetan’s voice in his ear, sweet and soothing, rocking him to sleep.

He does not want to be put down again.

He gets to shaky feet. They have piled the bodies of the culled candidates up in the corner of the keep to be burned; the smell of rot is beginning to clot at Julian’s nose, much more intense than he can remember it being before the Trial of the Grasses. Overwhelmingly acute, actually; a hundred layers of death and decay and body and blood to parse apart, to examine, to learn the shape of in his nostrils. He can hear voices, too, and taste the smoke of the fire, knows life is just around the corner, that it is there for him to re-join, if he wants to.

He doesn’t know what he wants. He wants to scream, cry, laugh, shout, shit himself, dance, tear somebody’s guts out, and then scream again. He doesn’t know what he wants. Something poisonous squirms in his belly.

He takes another ragged breath, shaking where he stands, his shirt stiff with dried blood and his feet bare. Mad cats get put down, and he does not want to be put down again.

He totters his way out of the small mountain of corpses, fearful and groggy and yet — yet hyper-alert, surrounded by a hundred tiny details — little ridges in the white lichen that chews upon the old stone — the comforting smell of pork roasting on the fire, as clear to him as if he stood over it, with a twist in his belly, even though he is not hungry — a score of slow slow slow heartbeats — a wall of colour and sound, sharpened to a point even in the dark.

It is too much, all far too fucking much, and the terrified bloodlust begins to rise in him again — like he is a wounded animal that knows only how to bite — until the desperate keening that sounds in his throat begins to take shape into something else.

He knows that tune — that note — the beginnings of an old nursery rhyme his favourite maid used to sing him. No lyrics, just melody. He slumps against the cold stone wall of the keep, draws a cold gulp of air in, and tries to _remember._ An old song, an older tune — elven, maybe — full of gentle lilts, careful rises, playful falls.

He hums the whole thing three times over. The red haze fades to nothing. Julian is alone in his head, breathing in the night air, cold enough to shiver a little.

He does not draw attention to himself when he rejoins the others. Instead, he finds Gaetan — Gaetan, whose face falls slack with shock, who looks as though he is seeing a ghost. Gaetan, who lets Julian fall back into his arms, like the child he can no longer be. If Gaetan wants to put him down again, he will — but Gaetan surely must know by now that it will not stick, that he will have to bury him alive in a locked coffin to stop him for good. Gaetan might have killed Julian, but he has never been cruel to him.

“I’m sorry,” Gaetan lies to Treyse, Guxart, Kiyan. “I must not have sunk the dagger as deep as I had thought. I was stupid; the blow was to kill a human boy, not a mutated one. I was foolish; I never felt for a pulse.”

“I won’t do it again,” Julian lies to Treyse, Guxart, Kiyan. “Please, let me live. I promise I won’t go mad again. I promise I’ll be good.”

Julian has always been quite the liar, quite the pretender.

“Perhaps,” says Gaetan, “Destiny wants the boy to live.”

Perhaps it is so; that part is no lie. And what can any of them do, when Destiny appears so adamant that the boy live? What can Julian do, if the world keeps refusing to let him die? The lies work, or perhaps it is their plea to fate — not that the reason matters in the end. What matters is that Mad Cat lives, even if his nine lives ought to have long ago run out.

* * *

The so-called Butcher of Blaviken is the first witcher Jaskier meets as _Jaskier._ He’s been a bard for a few years, having grown quite comfortable in the disguise. Most people don’t much care what School their contracted witcher hails from as long as he gets the job done, but after what happened at the Dyn Mawr Caravan, Jaskier had been eager to put as much distance between himself and the School of the Cat as he possibly could. Julian of Kerack numbered amongst the dead, throat slit in the battle, and Jaskier was not keen on anyone finding out how his deaths never quite seemed to stick. His miraculous survival after the Witcher Tournament was suspect enough. Besides, he has been hearing whispers, whispers that tell of any remaining cat witchers being hunted down and slain, the Cat School’s penchant for being just as willing to murder kings and queens as to murder monsters finally having come back to bite them in the arse.

They say cats have nine lives, but truthfully, Jaskier has long lost count of his. Certainly, the life of a harmless bard is the one that has suited him best so far, and if he is a little _too_ good at climbing out of windows when his various romantic escapades go awry, nobody pays enough attention to him to question it. Least of all Geralt, for whom a glamour to fix the odd eyes and an incessant stream of chatter both prove quite enough to trick him into thinking his foolhardy bard is just that — a blithe young idiot armed only with a death wish and a musical instrument. Geralt is no fool, but he is not nearly the liar that Jaskier is. If given no reason to doubt, he takes things at face value. He’s more than a little repressed, obviously, but he is, at his core, straightforward.

Jaskier never takes anything at face value, and is no more straightforward than the fork of a lightning strike.

He never meant to get involved with another witcher. But, unfortunately for him, Geralt is fascinating. He is everything Jaskier is not, even disregarding his current persona, because at the height of his witchering, Jaskier had questionable morals and an easy tongue, killing men as easy as he killed monsters as long as the coin was good enough. 

In contrast, Geralt’s morals are steadfast, and his tongue made of fucking stone, apparently.

Time spent with him is never boring, annoying him is a delight, and if Geralt’s public image could use a little musical rehabilitation after the whole Blaviken debacle, then Jaskier is only too happy to oblige. He knew the life of a witcher already, and if trailing Geralt around the continent scratches an itch he hadn’t known he still had, well, Jaskier has never been one to deny himself any of life’s simple pleasures.

He is _good_ at being Jaskier, too. He delights in it; a quick wit and a charming grin, his fingers fluid over the strings of his lute and his voice warm in his throat, leaving a legion of cuckolded husbands — and more than a few wives — in his wake. Though he regularly sings for his supper, he is successful more often than he is not. People roll their eyes at the sight of him, which is a whole lot better than when they had shrunk back in terror. He even makes peace with the circumstances of his birth, with his curse. Cobalt blue eyes and an unnatural proclivity for music do not quite make up for the whole deathlessness thing, but the music did land him a job as a lecturer at Oxenfurt, which was nice, especially during the winters when Geralt retreated back to Kaer Morhen. Being unable to die had seemed the cruellest curse of all, once upon a time, but Jaskier isn’t daft enough to deny that it has its perks, especially after the sacking of the caravan. He doesn’t even have to fake his death; instead he wakes up amongst a pile of lifeless corpses — beneath his _family,_ his _friends —_ and slips away unnoticed, light on his feet even when he is groggy and still half-cold. Dying is awful every time, but it does give him plenty of leave to become somebody new. Julian has always been good at that, at lying, spying, pretending. And so it goes: Julian becomes Jaskier, gifted bard, carefree minstrel, clever poet, lovelorn fool.

Jaskier never takes anything at face value — except, in truth, he was never the pretender he supposed himself to be. The real trick of playing pretend lies in keeping your head, in never getting so caught up in the lie that one begins to believe it themselves. At the tail end of a delightful twenty years, Jaskier has grown far too used to a life of silk doublets and elven-made lutes and idle chatter and keeping sane and forgetting the taste of blood and, of course, _shovelling shit._

He believed in it, or at least, most of him did, and that will never do.

So he throws Jaskier down the ravine with the lute, leaves the pieces of him dashed against the rocks, and slips back into the skin of Julian of Kerack, a skin that fits him snug as custom-made armour, familiar and safe and closing around him like he had never been gone. The madness comes back, too, as sure as if it had never left, but Julian knows how to live with that.

So it goes that Mad Julian of Kerack turns and leaves the mountain. His broken lute lies alone in the ravine behind him for hours still, until another witcher comes along and finds it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sincerely sorry about the screwy timeline. I was trying to Do Something but I do not think it worked. I hope it at least made sense...? Thank you so much for reading and please do let me know what you think!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I said this was only going to be two chapters but ... things have gotten out of hand ... again

The first thing Nilfgaard’s soldiers do when they catch them is gag Ciri. She fights like a wildcat, of course, but she is a girl only half-grown, and they are four, five, six adult men. They stuff a rag into her mouth, bind her hands, push her roughly to the ground and hold her there. She can do nothing but watch. 

The second thing they do is beat Geralt senseless, beat him until his eyes have gone dull and his curses come slurred. He gives as good as he gets right up until the moment a soldier presses the sharp end of his blade to Ciri’s throat. After that, Geralt falls slack. He lets them punch him, kick him, slam his head against the ground.

The third thing they do is force the two of them up the narrow stairs of the abandoned keep’s tower — Ciri hoisted roughly by the neck of her cloak, Geralt barely conscious where he is dragged between two soldiers, limbs limp, shins knocking painfully against the ridge of each step — and lock them in the highest room to rot.

At least, until the Black Knight arrives.

Because the fourth thing they do is send word to Cahir Mawr Dyffryn aep Ceallach. It took a little longer than expected, but the Lion Cub of Cintra and the witcher that was hiding her had, at last, stepped straight into the iron jaws of Nilfgaard’s carefully-laid wolf-trap.

* * *

Julian knows he cannot die for good. Even if the process is deeply unpleasant, and his ability not something he wants to advertise, it is still true. He has his deathlessness as a literal safety net; unlike the other boys, if he falls now, it is not the end of the line. Presumably, it will be the end of his witcher training — he will be cast out, alone, abandoned for his failure to pass their final test — but he will still be _alive._

All that said, being deathless is but cold comfort to him where he wobbles atop the tightrope, suspended a hundred feet above ground.

He takes a breath in; notes the way the wind fills him and the way it brushes past; traces the shape and weight of his own figure in the air; takes stock of every inch of his body, from the hair tossed by the breeze to the stiff curl of his toes, the arch of his feet curved in thin-soled shoes over the taut wire. He had teetered, he had almost lost his grip— but he stays calm and stays sane and stays standing until his balance at last returns to him.

He has walked a hundred tightropes before. None this high. None with these stakes. The rope is suspended between the rocky peak of a low-slung hill and the tower of the old keep. There is a mile to walk and the fall at its highest is thirty metres down — should they slip from that height, no Cat, no matter how skilled, is going to land on their feet.

It is the final trial. It is the last thing Julian must do before old Gezras slips the silver cat medallion over his head. It is the final hurdle, and though Julian does not fear dying, he knows the truth: failure is much worse than death, and unlike the other boys, if Julian falls, he will have the misfortune of living to see it.

The rope wobbles beneath him with a sudden gust; he is so high, now, that the wind has little in the way to break it. The air is frigid enough to freeze his breath into white plumes before him, to numb the pads of his fingers where he holds his arms outstretched. The glimmer of light at the tower window beckons him. There is not very much farther to go. He lets out the breath he had been holding, and takes another step. He does not look down. Not very much farther to go, he reminds himself, over and over, like a mantra, like a chorus, a tuneless song that roots his body to the tightrope rather than the earth, a long, long way down. Not much farther to go.

When Julian finally reaches the end of the line, scrambling in through the window of the tower, it is all he can do not to throw himself gracelessly to the floor, having never felt so relieved to have solid stone beneath his feet. It is not old Gezras who waits with his medallion, though — it is Gaetan, who smiles one of those rare, rare smiles. He hands Julian the hard-won prize, slips it over his head, so the snarling silver feline rests directly over Julian’s heart.

“You're a real Cat now, kitten,” he says, a little ruefully, perhaps, and ruffles Julian’s hair.

* * *

Julian of Kerack is very good at what he does — considering his humble beginnings as scourge of the Continent’s libraries rather than its monsters, this is no small achievement — but he is not perfect. He makes mistakes. Stupid ones. Fatal ones.

There are three wyverns in the old quarry in the woods, not two, and he’s already suffering from blood loss from slaying the first when the second and third arrive. He had been pushing himself too hard, taking too many jobs, barely giving himself the time to recover from one contract before he had moved onto the next. The first wyvern got the jump on him, got a swipe in on his thigh, grazed an artery, a gush of blood. By the time he slays it, Julian is already weak, and rapidly weakening further. He is done for the minute the other two screech their way into the quarry’s rock-hewn clearing, splatters of red dripping sickly down the grooves of sandstone.

Not that he doesn’t give it his all. He runs for cover in the trees, silver sword in hand — he already fumbled the steel one, let it drop, lost somewhere underfoot, rotting leaves slippery with damp and blood, all visibility stolen by the darkening dusk. There, Julian presses his back to the trunk of an aged oak, and tries to catch his breath. It is a bad sign that he lost his breath to begin with; means that he is tiring, that blood loss is taking its toll. He tears the cork off a potion with his teeth and downs it — old, familiar, noxious burn in his throat — but he doesn't know if it’ll be enough.

Then the third wyvern crashes into the branches overhead, and Julian’s silver sword is swinging again, and he is dodging the snap of teeth and tasting copper and rot on the creature’s hot breath, and there is no chance to recover any of the wind he’s lost.

He thinks, when there is just one wyvern left, and the world has gone terribly grey at the margins, that he might just make it. He’s got it crowded back against the scrubby rock of the quarry’s sheer cliff-face, he can smell its hot blood where he got it in the wing, in the side, in the belly, it is wounded and cornered. It is as good as dead.

Julian is a fine witcher, unhinged or not, but he is not perfect. He is not infallible. He makes a stupid mistake. 

Dead wyverns can still bite.

Its tail knocks his shaky feet out from under him, the ground comes surging up to meet him, and its teeth have closed around his side, have cut through armour and flesh and bone, an instant before he plunges the sword through its eye and into its brain.

Life leaves it with a huff. It slumps, and the weight takes Julian with it, its teeth still sunken into his abdomen. He does not feel any pain, which is not a good sign. He cannot think straight, which is not a good sign.

He staggers one step, two, three, before the dark spots in his vision swallow him whole.

When he wakes, it is morning. He is _freezing_ — he has not quite warmed up yet. It often takes him a little while. Sometimes his fingers are stiff for days. His slow heart is even slower to restart; there is bile and blood, gelatinous as yesterday’s gravy, gathering thick in his throat.

With a cut-off groan, he rolls onto his side and vomits.

“You were dead,” a voice says.

Julian’s mind is still woozy, his thoughts shapeless and fuzzy, as though he were drunk. He shakes his head as if to clear it, and makes to rise to his feet. The leather of his gambeson pulls at the skin of his belly where it is soaked with his blood, hours old, and sticky, the gore dried in and beginning to crust.

It is a little girl — the daughter of the farmer from whom he’d taken the contract. She is holding his steel sword, the one he had dropped in last night's skirmish; it is nearly the height of her, and looks ludicrously large in her small hands. Julian sees then that she has her father with her. He holds Ginger by the reins, and looks as though he would like to join Julian in puking his guts up.

“We— you were dead,” the girl says again. “Was he not dead, pa?”

Julian just looks at them, at a loss for what to say, how to explain. He’s always groggy when he comes back; words come slow and thick as honey, his limbs heavy as lead. He does not blame them for being frightened of him. It _is_ all rather difficult to account for, especially when he’s still pale and drawn, when he’s still chilled to the bone, and when he still has teeth-shaped holes in his armour.

“We… we went to fetch your horse,” says the farmer. “To carry your body back.”

“Yes, well, fortunately that won’t be necessary,” Julian says. He finally manages to get to his feet — screwing his eyes shut for a second as dizziness sweeps him from head to toe — and staggers over to Ginger, whose ears flicker with concern. “I’ll just take my payment and— and my sword, and I will be on my way.”

“Oh, come now, witcher! You look as though you can barely _stand,”_ the farmer says. “I swear, we thought you were gone. There was so much blood. You were cold. You…”

“You were _dead,”_ his daughter finishes. “No breath, gone white, your belly cut open. I felt for a heartbeat and all.”

Julian presses his face into Ginger’s mane for a second, just long enough to unscramble his brains. “I’m alright,” he tells them. “A witcher’s heart beats four times slower than that of an ordinary man, you know. I’m quite alright, I promise.”

He tries to smile down at the little girl, but he knows it is a wan and hollow thing.

“Well,” says the farmer, dubiously, “if you're sure, Witcher.”

“I’m sure,” Julian says, firmly, and gathers enough strength to swing himself up onto the saddle. If his vision blinks out for a minute — neither the farmer nor his daughter need to know that.

He takes his sword and his coin, pays for a room in an inn and a stall in the stables for Ginger, repairs the holes in his armour, and falls into a dreamless sleep for two days straight.

Whispers follow Julian of Kerack all the way down the Path. Entirely nonsense, of course; old wives’ tales, exaggerated, impossible, unproven. None believe them.

Julian would quite like for it to stay that way.

* * *

After the mountain, Julian goes to Oxenfurt.

He has savings from his lecturing days — it doesn’t pay a terrible lot, teaching, but he manages to scrape together enough coin for a new set of black armour, at least. His old kit has long gone to rust, and is a little too big for him now besides, because twenty years of relative leisure has robbed him of much of his muscle and bulk. In his old rooms at the university, hidden beneath the floorboards, there is a chest with two slim swords — one silver, one steel — and a wealth of daggers, throwing stars, brass knuckles, all kinds of knives, and more. Cats favour lighter weapons and quicker movements; Julian’s blades are smaller than Geralt’s twin longswords, but he doesn’t need to put a lot of power into his swings when he knows precisely where to aim them.

He lays it all out, unpacking the dusty remnants of a long-forgotten life, and stews in a horrid sort of silence for a while. An hour passes almost without him knowing; he might not have noticed, but for the familiar sounds of student revelry echoing up from the quads, but for the fact his arse is sore from sitting cross-legged on the hard floor and staring in silence at the sheer wealth of weaponry laid out before him. His silver cat’s head medallion catches on the low light of the warm, familiar bedroom, drawing his eye like a magnet. An ache has started up between his ears; he draws his knees up close to his chest and tries not to cry. 

Julian is sick to death of bloody _crying,_ and it’s all Jaskier’s fault — Jaskier, who wore his emotions on his sleeve, because they weren’t _dangerous._ Jaskier, who might have been prone to breaking a plate or two in a fit of temper, instead of slaughtering half a village. Not that Julian ever did such a thing — _Mad Cats get put down_ is a lesson he only needed to be taught once — but he has heard the stories. He was so very good at being Jaskier that he had hardly felt a hint of it for the guts of twenty long years. 

Jaskier was a fool, but he wasn't mad, and he kept Julian well-buried for a very long time. 

Julian, on the other hand, is not sure how best to bury Jaskier. Geralt — were he here, were he not filled with loathing at the sight of him, were he not desperate to be rid of him — might be better able to attest to how difficult Jaskier is to keep down.

But Julian has no time to cry. He has far too much to do.

There are his potions to think of, first of all, because all the ones he has left are long, long since expired, and while he remembers how to make more, the ingredients won't come easy or cheap. He’ll be outrageously out of practice, surely, so he ought to take simple jobs to begin with, he thinks — though killing is written into his muscle memory, and he doesn’t think it will be long in coming back.

When he decides on what he will keep — the swords, of course, and several daggers easily hidden on his person — he packs the rest away. He slips off the ring that his glamour was secured to, and, ignoring the uneasy sort of twinge in his belly, steps up to the mirror.

His eyes are not entirely yellow. The blue he had been born with — that strange, unnatural cobalt that often disconcerted Gaetan and outright disturbed his parents — dilutes it down to a colour that might be closer to green. His hair is shorter than it was when he last wore two swords upon his back, and his jaw clean-shaven, but Jaskier the bard had no silver scar on his temple, nor one just beneath his left eye. Jaskier the bard had never had his throat slit; had never suffered the cold steel of a knife between his ribs, straight into his heart; had never crawled free of the liquid black of a cold lake only to get dragged straight back down again. Jaskier the bard does not look back out of the glass at him now; Julian of Kerack sees himself, truly, for the first time in twenty years.

He winks at his reflection. 

It does not make him feel any better.

Julian has no need of Jaskier’s perfumes, his fancy soaps, his silk doublets, his rings, his leather-bound notebooks full of half-formed lyrics and misguided musings. He takes the chamomile soap anyway, and the notebook, and he slips the ring that kept his glamour secured into his leather potion bag — just for safekeeping. Just for old time’s sake. Just in case there comes a day when Julian’s armour grows too heavy to carry, or his skin too tight to bear.

* * *

The armies of Nilfgaard are not the only one on the hunt for a princess and a White Wolf. The message to the Black Knight is intercepted; the messenger’s throat slit. It is a clean death, so clean the soldier must hardly have struggled, may not have even seen it coming. If Nilfgaard is not mistaken, in fact, they would say this was the work of an assassin, and a very skilled one at that.

No matter. They send another message and another messenger, tripling the guard on the girl and the witcher. It is an old keep, long abandoned, and easily defended; it lay empty at the foot of the hills, uninhabited for years bar the grooves of caravan wheels in the grassy courtyard, the ashes of old fires, empty bottles of potions and sinister gurneys of unknown purpose rusting in a dank and dark dungeon. The keep is the perfect place to hide the witcher and the princess — so let the mysterious interceptor come. Killing a lone soldier is one thing, but no assassin, no matter how good, can break into a keep as heavily protected as this.

* * *

Julian does not catch sight nor sound of Geralt for a long time. This is deliberate. He knows the places a wolf witcher might wander, knows which parts of the continent are Geralt’s usual haunts, and so he steadfastly avoids them.

Unless Geralt dies or somebody locks Julian in a box and throws it into the ocean, he knows he is merely delaying the inevitable. He looks different without the glamour, of course, but he is not unrecognisable. When — not if — he and Geralt cross paths again, there won't be any hiding what he is. And if he thought Geralt’s anger on the mountain was bad enough, he dreads the thought of what Geralt will say when he discovers Jaskier lied to him for over twenty years. When he discovers what Jaskier _is._

Dogs and cats have never gotten along.

But that is a problem for tomorrow. Right now, there is a war going on.

This means there is not a lot of money going around for the regular folk who might want rid of a monster, but an awful lot of money going for powerful people who want rid of a rival. War always brings a certain amount of reshuffling amongst those powerful enough not to get caught up in the fray, but not so powerful that they become a target. It is not a bad time to be a Cat witcher, to be open-minded with the jobs he’s willing to take — to be a sword-for-hire, steel rather than silver.

Julian takes the poor men’s contracts anyway. Gets paid a pittance for a job a hundred times harder, and spat on in the street for doing it. Men die easy; monsters don't. He’d rather not dwell on the _how_ and the _why_ of the change in his mode of operations. Takes a hundred days to build a habit; Julian’s had twenty-odd years, even if, during that time, he wasn’t strictly the one doing the witchering.

He tells himself he needs the practice. Truthfully, though, it comes back to him easily. So easily, in fact, he often wonders if the past twenty years were barely more than a dream. Thoughts like that carry him nowhere good; he stays calm, stays sane, sings his little songs under his breath when it all grows a little too much, reality just a touch too jagged. Singing brings him back to himself. He’s had plenty of practice at _that_ , at least.

So it goes. He avoids people where he had used to flock to them, avoids mirrors where he had used to prance in front of them, avoids trouble where he had used to make it. Nobody recognises him, which is both an enormous relief and an incredible disappointment. He tells himself it is because he is so different now — he is a _witcher,_ for Melitele’s sake — and not at all because Jaskier was not half as famous as he fancied himself to be. 

Truthfully, Julian knows he looks different from Jaskier, though it should not be so stark as to render him unrecognisable to those who knew him when he still wore silk doublets and ocean-blue pantaloons. He keeps his hair the same length — just to tempt fate, really — but the greenish-yellow eyes are drastic enough to likely nullify the effort. Like a cat, they reflect light in the dark. There are all the scars, too, both the fatal ones and the ones he walked away from; his skin is littered with them. Claw-marks down his back and teeth-marks on his side. A dagger slipped between his ribs, a faint crescent on his temple, and another beneath his left eye. In truth, though, he knows it is the sheer _inhumanness_ of him that makes up the bulk of the difference, now that he has no reason to hide it. Cat witchers are lithe, liquid things; they have none of the bulk of Wolves or Bears, but double the speed and precision. Jaskier does not need to be big and broad to frighten and intimidate.

The ring that his glamour had been bound to is stowed safe in his bag. He has not had much cause to pass for human in the months since he dropped his lute down a narrow gorge on a bare and lonely mountain. It has only been months — but it truly, genuinely feels like a lifetime. Such is how Julian passes his days back on the Path. If Jaskier would have found the entire thing frightfully, hideously lonely, it doesn’t matter. Jaskier is long gone.

Then, Cintra falls.

It is not so much that Julian is dragged back into Geralt’s orbit, helpless as a moon caught in a bigger planet’s pull. Rather, it feels as though he simply circles back around. That it is something inevitable, something destined. That he — in his most sentimental moments, sentimental as a poet, a songwriter, a bard might be — comes back home.

* * *

In the days after the battle of Sodden Hill, a wind blows in from the sea and carries much of Sodden's ashes east. An eerie haze blackens the clouds, rimming them in charcoal rather than silver. Children fall ill with coughing fits, and the men return from the fields with a wheeze in their throats, and black dust gathered in the lines of their faces and their palms. Julian rips up one of his undershirts and ties it around his neck, securing it up over his mouth and nose to keep the ash from choking him, and keeps moving. Fear roams the land, ushered in under the feet of black-clad soldiers, and whispers of a sorceress so powerful she single-handedly brought an entire battlefield to ruin, an inferno springing free from her hands.

Or so Julian hears.

He stalks Geralt of Rivia’s movements from the killing fields outside Cintra all the way to Sodden Hill, and beyond. Remembering his first lesson in mouse-catching long ago, he slips his ring on his finger and hides his swords with his pack, and makes himself small and unnoticed in hushed, frightened inns; or gathers around the fire in refugee camps. He goes unnoticed, just another displaced wanderer with a scarf tied over his nose — but he is watching, and he is listening. He always had sharp ears.

* * *

The Witcher Tournament in Kaedwen is an utter debacle, of course. 

Treyse being, well, _Treyse,_ has them all agreeing to some half-baked plan to murder the wolves in the stands. Julian is not sure where Guxart is when this plan is being formed, as he cannot imagine the eldest Cat would approve, but Guxart and Treyse have never liked one another. Julian has borne witness to plenty of hissing fits between the two of them, both scrambling for control of the School after Gezras’ death, like a pair of tomcats pissing on the same tree in order to call it theirs. It doesn’t matter, anyway, because Guxart never shows up in the end. The whole thing has something or other to do with the King; Julian does not care enough to pay attention. He has never been much of a politician, and would certainly not have made a good Viscount even if his parents had not had him killed three times and then pawned him off to the first person who offered, witcher or not.

But Julian goes to the tournament, obviously, ill-advised as the whole thing is. Not because he has anything against the Wolf School, but because he thinks the whole thing might be a bit of fun, a spectacle, a _story._ He has always had a great love for drama.

The King’s men open fire on wolf and cat alike, killing witchers indiscriminate of school, indiscriminate of innocence or guilt. Like the dance of a flock of starlings, the flurry of arrows are a shadow against the clouds. He remembers that; the strange and savage beauty of it.

Julian is struck down almost immediately. He dies along with all the others, though unlike the others he is not dead for very long. When he comes back to himself, he has enough good sense to pretend; at least until the fighting stops, and the bodies are left to stiffen under the baldly uncaring sky.

Then, he sneaks out of the arena of corpses, unheard and unseen by any but ghosts. He does not spare one look back — no matter how desperately he wants to, no matter how mad with grief, with fear, with fright. So many are dead, and Julian is not. That seems to be a running theme, for him. To live where others don’t. To cling to life with a grip no wound, no poison, no monster nor man can hope to shake.

Guxart, it turns out, had been imprisoned with the leader of the Wolves before the tournament. With Treyse dead, he is free to take over the Cat School. The damage is done, however; no Cat Witcher may set foot in Kaer Morhen now. Their winters are to be spent out in the cold. Not that any of this particularly bothers Julian. He is long accustomed to being locked out of all the warm places.

“You lived?” Guxart asks, upon Julian’s bloodstained, weary return.

“When I die, it will not be at a silly little tournament,” Julian tells him, primly. "I shall go out in a blaze of glory, or I shall not go out at all."

Guxart only narrows his eyes, saying nothing. Julian does not stop to wonder what conclusions the old witcher has drawn. There are monsters to slay, kittens to train, kings to kill.

The year of the tournament is when Julian realises that the strange curse that saves him, the curse that brings him back to life every single time — is precisely that. A curse, and a cruel one. To live, where others have not. To live with no end in sight. To live, and to have no choice in the matter. He will cling to life with a grip that breaks his knuckles, fingers raw and bloody, shoulders aching — and still he will not be permitted to let go. Still he won't be allowed rest.

It is not Julian’s first massacre, nor will it be his last. He may fall with comrades in battle, but he will always wake alone.

* * *

After the mountain, and after he loses both Jaskier and Yennefer in one fell swoop, Geralt winters at Kaer Morhen. It does not help soothe his frayed and ragged nerves, and he spends more time pacing the draughty old keep than socialising in it. But, truth be told, most days he is glad he came, if only for the fact that he isn’t alone.

Today is not a day that he is glad.

“Oh, I nearly forgot to mention it,” Lambert says, meeting Geralt’s eye mid-chew, open-mouthed as usual. “A mad Cat asked after you.”

“What?” Geralt near-growls.

He is in a bad mood today, mostly because he cannot shake the feeling that he shouldn't be here at all. There are whispers that Nilfgaard is gathering strength in the south, that they are about to launch into all-out war come spring. That they are headed for Cintra, where the Child Surprise that Geralt has spent the last twelve years very determinedly _not_ thinking about still lives. Now, he — or she, Geralt supposes, for he knows nothing of Queen Calanthe’s grandchild — is _all_ he can think about. He doesn’t have much else to ponder: Jaskier is dead, Yen is in the wind, and Geralt is desperately lonely without them. He resents them both for it, as if they had chosen to hurt him, when in truth, he has nobody to blame but himself, and not just for hurting them, for driving them away. Had he not let them worm their way into his heart, he would still have nothing to lose.

Should have learned his bloody lesson after Renfri. Don’t let people in.

He had thought wintering at Kaer Morhen would help, but on days like today, he doesn't think anything will help. Today is a day for wandering the length of the keep thrice over — or, worse, a day for opening the dented case of a broken lute to look at it, driven only by the miserable, masochistic impulse to rub salt in an open wound.

“In some backwater little village in Aedirn,” Lambert explains, drawing Geralt back out of his maudlin thoughts. “He came there for the contract I’d just completed. Julian of Kerack, apparently. I asked around after him.”

“I don’t know which Cat you met, but Julian of Kerack is meant to be dead. He was killed along with the rest of them in the attack on the Dyn Marv Caravan,” Vesemir grumbles from the corner. “Only stragglers and strays remain — and good riddance, too. I never liked the Cats, not even before the Witcher Tournament in Kaedwen. Their mutations were warped and twisted. Enough to turn them mad. They had no choice but to kill half their candidates after the Trials were done.”

Lambert does not seem especially perturbed by the idea he was speaking to a long-dead witcher. “Julian of Kerack or not, this one was certainly mad,” he agrees. “Threw a fit because he didn’t like the bard’s singing. Thought I was going to have to put him down myself for a minute or two. Aiden is the only Cat I’ve met that I could stand, I don’t know what went wrong with the rest of them.”

“Anything goes in the School of the Cat,” Vesemir all but growls. “Julian of Kerack was one of the younger ones. I didn’t hear much about him from Guxart during the days we were imprisoned together — bar a few odd things. Hard to kill, he said. Slippery.”

“And what the fuck did this Cat want with me?” Geralt says, through his teeth.

It is not Lambert’s fault that Jaskier is dead and Yennefer is gone, and it is not Vesemir’s fault that a discussion of the Cat School’s flaws is not high up on Geralt’s list of preferred topics. It is nobody’s fault, bar his own, that he is grieving, that he is lonely, that he is heartsick and unmoored. But sometimes Geralt does want to slam Lambert’s smug head straight down into his stew, or storm out of the room with Vesemir still only mid-speech.

“Nothing,” Lambert says, examining a bone for scraps. “Just asked if you were alive. Called you the White Wolf. Said he was a fan of the song. That earworm one, _Toss a Coin,_ at a guess, unless you've managed to entice any other idiot bard to pen you a new ballad.”

Geralt clenches his hands into fists.

Eskel glances between him and Lambert, and immediately changes the subject.

* * *

“Witch,” says a voice — friendly, almost conversational.

Yennefer stiffens where she stands, warming her hands by the fire, avoiding people’s eye. The black-clad man sidles up to her, casually, calmly. If it were not for the two swords strapped to his back and the silver gleam of what she thinks is a medallion chain at the back of his neck, she thinks she would have thought him an assassin sent to kill her.

When she realises he is a witcher, she isn’t sure if that is better or worse. Strange, greenish-yellow eyes crinkle with amusement over a dust-lined scarf that hides the lower half of his face; he is smaller than Geralt, has less presence than Geralt, but there is the same staticky sense of danger about him.

“Witcher,” she says, trying not to let her wariness show.

Yennefer does not have enough chaos left to levitate a flower, never mind kill a witcher. But she does not need chaos to be powerful. 

After Sodden, she was wrung-out and raw and half-delirious. She woke in ashes, with barely enough wits left to dodge the occasional Nilfgaardian patrol, and no strength at all to portal herself to safety. Instead, she has been wandering the countryside for days, dressed in rags, going hungry, waiting for her chaos to come trickling back. Nobody takes much notice — there are a hundred, a thousand similar men and women left in Nilfgaard’s wake with the same hollow eyes and ash-smeared faces.

Yennefer allows herself her days of dumbstruck, shellshocked wandering. She thinks it is more than what she is owed; every time she closes her eyes, she feels the sear and scrape, the splitting heat, the fire that felt as though it was birthed in her very bones. She gives herself her few days to wallow in shock — but Yennefer of Vengerberg does not have it in her to be pathetic for very long.

In the flickering light of the fire, she tries not to let her distrust show; she does not know how this strange witcher knows who she is. Though she cannot pinpoint _how_ , he seems familiar to her. His eyes are unfamiliar, and his face half-hidden, but the cadence of his voice is one she’s sure she knows. Regardless of who he is, she is determined: she won’t let another witcher get the better of her.

“I would know those lovely purple peepers anywhere, but I must say, Yennefer, that you’re looking a little more dishevelled than I’m used to,” he tells her, bright and sardonic. “Very, er, refugee-chic. Is that a knot in your hair?”

Her nostrils flare. “Who the hell are you?”

Yellow eyes blink, as though surprised. “Oh,” says the witcher, and even though she can only see half of his face, she recognises the flicker of loneliness she glimpses there, for she’s felt it often enough herself. That breathless little leap between who you are, who you were, and who you want to be — suddenly and seemingly at random collapsing into a gorge, a ravine, an unnavigable distance between a myriad of selves. She knows that look. She knows that look so well that the mere sight of it steals the breath from out of her chest, splits her open and breaks her crooked back all over again.

“You know,” the witcher says, as he pulls down the scarf, “I had forgotten that you didn’t know. I think a part of me assumed you had figured it out, that you had seen through me.”

She took her few wild days to recover from Sodden. She might need another few to recover from the shock of this.

“I didn’t,” Yennefer whispers. Truth be told — she had never looked. "I didn't know."

“Anyway,” Jaskier continues as though there had been no interruption, turning back to the fire, where the flickering light casts dancing shadows on his impossibly strange features, his impossibly _familiar_ features, “I’m not here to chit-chat. They’ve got Geralt and the Princess of Cintra locked up in a tower around five leagues north of here, and I’d greatly appreciate your help in getting them out.”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The response to this fic has been so so so lovely — thank you so much to everyone who has left kudos and comments so far!
> 
> While the next chapter will be the last (I promise lmao) I realised that I have loads of more ideas for expanding this story, and am thinking of making it a series and writing a sequel? If that is something you would be interested in, do let me know!
> 
> Final chapter soon (with an ACTUAL rescue and reunion this time)!


	3. Chapter 3

For most of the first day, Geralt comes and goes; nose bloody, both eyes bruised black, his lip swollen, one leg held out stiffly in front of him. He looks strangely _small_ where he slumps against the cell wall, bloodied and bruised. Ciri thinks he might be concussed, but she can’t be sure. The tower room is dank and damp and completely unfurnished; the heavy steel door has been bolted shut, and even if they weren't a hundred feet in the air, the window is barred and locked. Their hands are still bound behind their backs, but the soldiers haven't shackled either of them to the wall — Ciri thinks it's probably an ill omen that they haven't bothered. They must be confident there’s no way the two of them are getting out of this room regardless of whether they’re chained to it or not. For hours she curls up next to Geralt, listening to the slow wheeze of his breath, and curses the royal education that had her learning three styles of calligraphy and all the vagaries of regional etiquettes when she could have been learning about useful things, like how to tell when somebody’s got a concussion, and what to do about it.

“Looks worse than it is,” Geralt mumbles, still sagging against the wall next to her.

She doesn’t know whether to cry or laugh at that. She can’t speak around the gag they’ve stuffed into her mouth and knotted tightly at the back of her head, but she makes her opinion known with a half-hysterical hum at the back of her throat.

“Hm.” Geralt’s bruised eyelids droop closed again. “I’ll heal soon,” he promises her then, voice a little garbled.

Ciri just sighs, closing her eyes and curling up closer against his shoulder in an attempt to stave off the chill of their stone prison. Time has gone lax and stretchy in the dimness of their towertop cell, as though a life beyond it were never quite real, as though this was all she was meant for — an endless, unceasing cycle of flight and capture, each time more fraught and arduous than the last. She doesn’t cry, no matter how much she wants to. Even if Geralt gets better, what happens then? What happens when the Black Knight comes, and tries to take her away? Geralt’s witcher-healing may very well have him back on his feet in a day or two — but Ciri isn’t foolish enough to think Nilfgaard will let him go, nor does she think he’ll just stand back and let them take her. 

Again, and again, and again, she thinks that if it hadn’t been for her, Geralt wouldn't be in this mess. Just like Dara, or Mousesack — poor, poor Mousesack — or even _Martin,_ who might well have been a snake, but who didn't deserve to die because of it. Just like the people slain at the refugee camp, who hadn’t known her, who hadn’t had a single thing to do with her, and were slaughtered all the same. Ciri can’t shake the dreadful, sickly feeling that she’s the cause of all of it; that she is somehow responsible for every awful thing that has happened since her grandmother and Eist had ridden to war. Experience so far has taught her that she brings only death and destruction in her wake. She shouldn’t have assumed that finding Geralt of Rivia had made her safe. She shouldn't have assumed that things might turn out okay — shouldn't have dared _hope,_ like a foolish little girl, like as if she had learned nothing in the past few weeks. Because the shadow that follows her has finally caught up to Geralt — Geralt who feels as familiar to her as if she’s known him all her life, not for a mere few days. Geralt, who, despite his frightening eyes, his bulk, his growl of a voice, she knows deep in her bones to be fundamentally _good;_ good in a world that does not have a lot of goodness to spare.

And now she’s gone and killed him, too.

Tears prickle at her eyes, but she drifts off into an uneasy doze before any can fall in earnest, Geralt’s slow, even breath better than a lullaby.

* * *

“I don’t mean to be impertinent,” Jaskier says, “but what is the point of being a sorceress if your sorcery can up and leave you just like that?”

“It hasn’t _left_ me,” Yennefer objects. “I'm just — drained. And we both know that you thrive on being impertinent.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say about your good friend.”

“We are not friends.”

He smirks up at her — he’s got the scarf tied around his face again, but she can tell by the crinkle at the corners of his eyes. “Oh, well, if that’s the case, you may give me back my horse.”

“Absolutely not.” Yennefer leans forward to scratch Jaskier’s plodding grey gelding behind the ears. “Do show some chivalry, Jaskier.”

She’s tired; exhausted in a way she hasn't been for years. And Jaskier — _Jaskier_ — had noticed, had handed her his own cloak to fix around her shoulders, and helped hoist her up onto Pegasus’ saddle without a word said about it. He sets a brisk, tireless pace on foot at Pegasus’ shoulder; the keep where Nilfgaard is holding Geralt and his Child Surprise is around a day's hike away, and Jaskier seems determined to make it in half that time.

Inevitably, Yennefer finds herself staring at him again. She isn’t sure she can help it. There is something different about him, aside from the glaringly obvious fact that he now has yellow eyes in place of blue, black armour in place of colourful jackets, and two swords in place of a lute. She thinks that he seems more… _subdued._ Subdued in a way she can’t quite define; he is less like himself, almost. As though he is playing a part he doesn’t believe in, or a role that doesn’t quite convince him. Which is pretty rich, she thinks, considering this is the first time in the years they've known one another that he has ever shown her who he really was. If he had been living a lie for the past two decades, why, she wonders, does he seem so out-of-sorts now that the jig is finally up?

“Geralt doesn’t know,” she realises. It isn’t a question; she’s not even sure she meant to say it aloud. She watches as Jaskier’s shoulders stiffen from her perch atop Pegasus’ back.

He is silent for a moment. Then, he lets out a long breath. “Of course he doesn’t know.”

“Why?”

“You’ll really have to be more specific here, Yennefer. Why doesn’t Geralt know? Or—”

“Why pretend to be a bard for over two decades?” she interrupts. “Why hide who you really are? I mean, what was the purpose of it?”

There is a furrow between his brows when next he speaks, an odd sort of deliberate-ness to his step that is entirely unlike the bard she thought she’d known. “I needed to lay low,” he tells her. “At least in the beginning. There aren’t many witchers left at all, now, and there are even fewer of my own persuasion.”

“Cats?”

He nods, the movement stiff. “We were nomadic, after the fall of Stygga. Travelled from city to city in a caravan, trained our candidates wherever we could. Conducted the Trials in any old abandoned building we found. It made us easy targets. Twenty five years ago, my School was sacked by soldiers, and everyone in it killed. It was retribution.” Black amusement colours his tone. “Most other Schools prefer to keep their noses out of politics, but we Cats have never limited our skills to monsters. Few kings want a school full of would-be assassins parked outside the city walls.”

“But you survived. Obviously.”

A non-committal wave of his hand. “Eh. I was counted amongst the dead. Didn’t want to advertise that I wasn’t. Being a bard wasn't meant to be a long-term thing, just a temporary disguise, enough to throw people off my tail. It worked because it was so drastic, so unthinkable. And,” at this, she sees a blush rise to his cheeks above the rim of the scarf. _There’s the Jaskier I remember_ , she finds herself thinking fondly, only to catch herself at the last moment, because _fond_ and _Jaskier_ are not two concepts she had ever imagined would cohabit in her head. “And,” he continues, “I had always liked to sing.”

“You maintained an elaborate lie for twenty years because you _liked to sing?”_

“Well,” Jaskier says, and she can hear his frown, even if she can’t see it, “when you put it like that, it does sound rather daft.”

“I can think of another word for it.”

Jaskier’s voice is mild, almost timid. “It was easy. Comfortable. Safe, relatively. I wasn’t used to that. It suited me. So I kept it going. I don’t know if I knew how to stop.”

“Not even when you met Geralt?” she says, skeptical. “If anyone should understand the life of a witcher, it would be _another_ bloody witcher.”

“Geralt would have hated me more if he knew the truth.” An almost-imperceptible wince, before his voice brightens. “Old schisms between the schools. Cats and Wolves don’t get along.”

Yennefer barks out a very unladylike laugh at that. “You lied to him over ridiculous witcher _politics?_ Over a skirmish that dates back to before either of you were born?”

Jaskier shrugs, still with that manufactured brightness. “We were both at the tournament in Kaedwen, actually. It’s hard to believe looking at this fine face, I know, but I’m quite a bit older than I seem.”

“Jaskier,” she says, firmly. “What was the real reason?”

He nudges Pegasus off the road, then, eyes narrowed, head tilted a little to the side as he listens to something her ears have no hope of catching. “Cross-country from here on out I think, boy.” When Pegasus voices his discontent with a snuffle and a nip at Jaskier’s shoulder, he grouches out, “Oh, don’t give me that lip. Count yourself lucky. Yennefer is a lot lighter than I am.”

Yennefer doesn’t push. She knows when somebody wants to change the subject. Lapsing into an uneasy silence that she isn’t sure how best to break, another hour or two passes as they skirt the margins of fields and take overgrown paths through scrubby sections of woodlands. She doesn’t even notice that her eyelids have begun to droop until Jaskier huffs out a little laugh.

“Tired?”

“Have _you_ ever tried setting an entire battlefield alight?”

Now, it’s his turn to smile fondly as he glances over at her, scarf slipped down under his chin. “You can try to sleep if you like. We’ve another league and a half to go.”

“Mm,” she agrees, tucking his cloak tighter around her own shoulders.

“I didn’t want to say it, but you certainly look like you need the rest,” he adds, because, witcher or not, he’s still _Jaskier._ He dodges her attempt to smack him, and, as she leans forward over Pegasus’ withers, pillowing her head on her arms, she sees him stick out his pink tongue at her like the overgrown child he is.

“The minute my magic returns,” she warns him, drowsily, “I _will_ hex you into next week.”

“I expect nothing less.”

* * *

The Viscount and Viscountess de Lettenhove wake suddenly in the middle of the night when a cold wind ruffles their bedclothes, raising gooseflesh on their arms, chilling them all the way down to their old and weary bones.

“Who left that fucking window open?” the Viscountess grumbles, sitting up and wondering if she can’t call a maid to close it for her so that she doesn’t have to get out of bed, wondering what time it is, wondering if she’ll manage to sleep again tonight — she is getting old, with aches and pains in her joints, and sleep does not come easy to her.

Then she sees the glowing green eyes in a darkened corner of the room.

She lets out a great shriek, scrambling back in terror to cower against the headboard. Her husband is so alarmed by her cry that he falls out of the bed entirely, landing with a sore thump and a heavy grunt on the rug.

The eyes do not move. They do not even blink. The old Viscount and his wife cannot see any details in the dim light, the monstrous eyes catching only on the faintest glow of the moon, but it looks as though the stranger has taken a seat in the Viscount’s armchair, leaning back and making himself comfortable. There is just the shadowy suggestion of arms crossed over his chest in the darkness, one foot propped up on the opposite knee; his face is largely hidden from them, all but those terrible, terrible eyes.

The Viscount gets to his feet with a shaky wheeze, scrambling for a match to light the bedside candle, yelling for the guards, for the maid, for anyone — there is an intruder in the house, there is a monster in the bedroom — there is a madman — a burglar — a thief — an assassin — a shadow with the eyes of a cat.

“Now, really,” says the shadow calmly, “there is absolutely no need for all this fuss.”

“What do you want? Money? Take it!” the Viscountess cries, drawing the quilt up closer, up around her neck, as if thin bed linens might somehow save her from the steel of an assassin’s blade. “Take whatever you want — just, please, don’t hurt us!”

“I don’t want your money.” Those eerie eyes still do not blink as he rises to his feet. The movement is liquid-smooth and utterly silent.

“Then what _do_ you want?” demands the old Viscount, fumbling with the candle, a terrified tremble making useless his hands.

At that moment, the match finally strikes. The candle is lit. The Viscount and Viscountess see the face of their uninvited guest at last.

He still has his father’s nose, and his mother’s mouth, and his grandfather’s gently waving hair. But now he is tall and lithe, with a pair of unnatural yellow eyes, two swords strapped to his back, and a witcher’s cat medallion resting snug on his chest, directly over his heart.

“I was in the area,” says Julian, smiling wide and toothy, “and I thought I would just drop in to say hello.”

It takes the Viscount and his wife a moment to recover, to swallow their shock, to adjust to the sight of their long-lost son in the yellow candlelight. Last they saw him, he was six years old. Last they saw him, he was looking up at them with wide eyes, wrapped in a strange witcher’s cloak. It has been decades — he ought to be in his forties — yet he does not look a day over twenty-one. Neither of them can read the expression on his face, familiar and unfamiliar as it is. Neither can be sure of what he is thinking.

“Are you here to kill us, Julian?” the Viscount’s wife says, finally.

Julian cocks his head to the side and pulls a face as if to indicate he is thinking about it.

The Viscount sinks back down to sit on the edge of the bed; his heart is not built for this sort of shock, not now. “I thought witchers only kill monsters,” he says, trying his best to keep the quake out of his voice. “Not people.”

“Your status as _people_ is up for debate,” Julian says, “but besides, I was raised by Cats. You ought to have packed me off with a Wolf or Griffin if you had wanted me to limit my skills solely to monsters.”

The Viscount states at him, tight-lipped. “Why are you here now? What do you really want? It’s been well over thirty-five years since you… left.”

Julian shrugs. “I _was_ advised against returning, but I don’t often do as I’m told. What sort of son would I be if I came all the way to Kerack and didn’t even bother to pay my dear old parents a long-overdue visit?” 

“It’s been _thirty-five years,”_ the Viscount says again, voice halfway to a whimper.

“Yes, you’ve already mentioned that, but don’t worry. I don't plan on staying very long.” Something strange seems to pass over Julian’s face for a moment, then, the flicker of some unknown impulse barely held back. “Do…”

Beneath them, they hear the sounds of movement in the large house; the echo of footsteps, muffled yells. Their shouts have roused somebody, at least. Help is coming.

Julian has heard it, too, clearly, by the way he trails off mid-sentence. In fact, his mother supposes, he may well have heard it long before she and her husband did, if the stories of witchers and their unnaturally keen senses are to be believed. Julian does not, however, seem especially worried. As the Viscount and Viscountess watch, struck silent with dread, he reaches into his pocket and produces a very familiar looking key.

“I had thought this conversation ought to remain private,” he says, helpfully. “Since you’ve told everyone that I am long dead, it might raise some awkward questions should I reappear now — especially with the,” he gestures to himself, the eyes, the swords, the armour, “new _look._ Handsome as I might be, I wouldn’t want to give any of the maids a heart attack.”

The door rattles in the hinges as the servants try to open it — but it is no good. They are not getting into the bedroom unless they break in the lock or smash through the door. Playfully, Julian tosses the key up in the air only to catch it again with ease, the movement quick as a viper-strike.

“My lord, is everything alright?” comes the muffled call through the locked door.

The Viscount opens his mouth — as though he were about to yell, to scream, to announce the return of a child long supposed dead. His wife cuts him off before he can.

“Give us a minute,” she says, projecting her voice for the servants to hear, “and if we have not come out by then, call the guard and break down the door.”

“...Very well.” They hear the sounds of the servant moving back, hesitant. The door stops rattling.

“Thank you, Mama. A whole minute. That was very considerate of you.” The contempt that laces Julian’s voice is withering. He takes another step forward, holding up the key. “Anyway. It ought to be enough. I want you to answer me one thing, answer it truthfully, and then I’ll give you back the key and go. I will leave you both alive and well, and never set foot in Kerack again.”

All the air seems to have left the room, even if that blasted window is still open, even if they can _see_ as Julian’s hair is shifted gently by the breeze. His expression is stony, his mouth set in a thin line, and the hand that does not hold the key strays awfully close to the dagger sheathed at his belt.

“What is it?” she whispers.

Yellow eyes trap them both in an unblinking glare for several long moments. Then, Julian asks: “Do you think you could ever have loved me?”

The Viscount begins to splutter, gone as pale as his starched linen night-shirt. “I— of course we _loved_ you, Julian — we just— well—”

His wife cuts him off once again. “No,” she says, shortly. “We never wanted you, and until that witcher came along, we thought we would never be rid of you.” Her husband turns to her, scandalised, terrified, but she doesn’t let him speak, doesn’t allow him take it back. “Don’t, dear. The boy is no fool.”

Julian stays very still — but he does not seem shocked, or surprised, or upset, or even angry.

“But I expect you already knew that, didn’t you, Julian?” the Viscountess asks, voice tight.

A beat of silence passes. Then, Julian smiles again. There is no humour in it — only menace, his teeth sharp where he bares them at the frightened couple, still huddled in their bed. 

“I think,” he says, quietly, “that I had just needed to hear it said.”

The servant begins to rattle at the door again. He isn’t alone; they can hear the heavy grunts of the stablehand and the single armed guard as they hoist some kind of battering ram, swinging it against the door with a shockingly loud crash. Immediately, the carved and polished wood begins to crack.

“Are you going to kill us?” the Viscount babbles.

Another crash. The door splinters further.

Julian sniffs a laugh. “I would, you know,” he says, cheerily. “Gods know you deserve it for all the times you killed me. I expect you would have me murdered right this minute if you could. But, you know, it has been thirty-five years. And, in the end, I like to think that I am _nothing_ like you.”

This time, when the staff of the house hurl the battering-ram against the door, it splits open, swinging on bent hinges, the servants all crashing gracelessly through the doorway to land in an unruly heap upon the floor. The Viscount and Viscountess both sit frozen with fright in their bed, feet tangled in the sheets, white as if they had just seen a ghost.

Perhaps they had. Because Julian is gone — gone in a blink — gone as though he had never been there at all. They are alone in the bedroom, the key to the door left on the foot of the bed. The window is still open.

Another icy breeze shifts the curtains, the cold draught of air whistling through the old house and its many empty rooms.

* * *

“Sorry,” Geralt rumbles when he accidentally tugs on her hair.

Ciri makes what she hopes is a reassuring hum through the gag that Geralt is currently trying to loosen. It is taking a lot of manoeuvring; they are back-to-back, Geralt standing where Ciri kneels, so that the knot of the gag at the back of her head is about level with Geralt’s bound hands. Since he can’t _see_ the knot he’s trying to undo, they've been suffering through quite a bit of trial and error. 

Neither of them have eaten or drank in a day. Ciri’s head throbs, her mouth so dry that the awful rag stuffed into it chafes her tongue, and her stomach has long since given up rumbling, the hunger pangs fading to leave a vague, hollow sort of nausea. Despite not having eaten anything either, Geralt _has_ recovered quite a bit by the second day, like he had promised. He’s well enough to stand on his own, lopsided but unsupported, his bad leg still hurting him but leagues better than it had been the day before. His mood has lifted too, enough that he was the one to suggest the attempt to undo Ciri’s gag.

“Hm,” he says. Ciri hasn’t known him for very long, but she is getting very accustomed to the variances in his _hm_ ’ing. This one translates to: _I think I’ve got it._

The gag comes loose a mere moment later. Ciri spits the balled-up fabric out onto the floor, taking in a blessedly clean, cool gasp of air. Her mouth tastes revolting, and her lips are chapped and dry, but the gag is gone and she can speak freely again.

“Thank _fuck,”_ she says, voice a husk.

Geralt huffs a laugh, and doesn’t call her out on her very un-courtly language.

Then, without warning, he lunges forward and tackles her to the ground, flattening her to the floor with his own weight.

A clang, as the arrow that had just flown through the window bounces off the reinforced iron door and falls limply to the ground.

Both of them stare at it in shock for a moment.

There is a white piece of paper wrapped around the shaft.

It takes another hurried five minutes of fumbling — Geralt refuses to let Ciri rise any further than a foot from the ground, so he is the one who takes charge of unrolling the paper — to loosen the note from the arrow-shaft with his bound hands, fingers wriggling in their shackles. Once he has it unrolled, he lays it flat on the ground, and shuffles back so they both can read it.

_HELP IS COMING. TAKE COVER AFTER MESSAGE RECEIVED. SECOND ARROW INCOMING. PLEASE SECURE ROPE._

Beneath that is a hasty mess of scribbled lines making illegible a pair of names. Ciri can’t read what they are — whoever wrote it seemed determined to erase them. But, beneath the scored-out names is another pair of words, in a distinctly different hand.

_— YOUR FRIENDS_

“What the hell does that mean?” Ciri asks, still hoarse.

Geralt just shakes his head, mouth flattened into a line. “I don’t know, but that’s Yennefer’s handwriting. The first part, at least. Take cover to the left of the window,” he orders. “I don’t know what she’s planning.”

Together they duck to the side of the window. Adrenaline sharpens everything to a breathless sort of clarity; Ciri can hear her every heartbeat, the rush of blood in her ears. She doesn’t know who Yennefer is, or what the note means — but she can’t help the flicker of hope, treacherous and bright, that sparked to life at the sight of the note and now catches like fire in her chest, irrepressible, burning all her terror to dust in its wake.

Maybe — just maybe — things might be alright after all.

The arrow with the length of sturdy rope tied around the end of it flies between the bars of the window a mere moment later.

* * *

When he intercepted the message from Nilfgaard, Julian had discovered that they were keeping Geralt and the girl in the same abandoned keep as the one in which he suffered through the Trials. That came as a relief; he knew exactly where to find it, and once he was there, he would know how to navigate it.

Now, having climbed to the upper branches of a sturdy oak in order to get a better look, staring at the shadow of the keep against the dusk — the crumbling stone of the walls, the collapsed section of rampart, the scattered growths of white lichen, the smell of smoke — he is struggling to feel relief.

There, sunken into the ground to the left of the main hall, is the door to the dungeons — the winding steps into the dark, the screams echoing up from below, the shackles that bind him to the gurney, the agony that _blinds him_ — and there is the corner in which they burned the bodies of the children killed in the Cull. There is the watchtower in the nearside corner in which Gaetan slipped the cat medallion over his neck, and the hall-turned-infirmary in which he woke to a tidal-wave of sensation, an unceasing barrage of vision and sound — woke confused and overwhelmed and so terribly, terribly afraid that he had tried to strangle Treyse where he bent over the bed. There by the wall is where the caravan had been packed away in the summer, and next to it is where the cooking-fire had been kept lit, and there is the flattened boulder where he had won an arm-wrestling match against Cedric only to lose the next against Joël. If it weren’t for the soldiers patrolling the ramparts and stationed at every entrance, armed to the teeth, helmets glinting a little in the low light, Julian would half-expect old Guxart himself to come strolling out of the hall, with a glower that could put Geralt’s to shame.

“Jaskier?” Yennefer’s voice drags him back to the present roughly by the tail, scattering all of Julian’s ghosts to the breeze. He can’t see her through the branches, but he can smell the anxiety rankling her, and hear dead leaves crunch under her restless pacing. They’ve lashed Pegasus to a nearby tree, still saddled for a speedy getaway if needed, but Nilfgaard has proved themselves extraordinarily arrogant so far: the keep is so thronged with soldiers that they have not bothered to send any out to patrol the woods.

“Tower or dungeon?” Julian calls down. “Where do you think you would choose to keep your prisoners held, were you not a fearsome and stunningly beautiful sorceress and instead a smelly old general in the Nilfgaardian army? Or if you prefer, we can pick one each and — ha! — toss a coin for it?”

Yennefer appears at the foot of the tree, looking up at him with her arms crossed over her chest. She is still wearing his cloak, but she no longer appears swamped by it; no longer looks weak enough to shatter at the slightest touch. “You said you know this keep. Which would _you_ choose?”

Julian closes his eyes. She’s right, of course. He knows this keep. His own history is etched into every stone. The tower and the dungeon are equally likely choices; either one would make a fine prison. But, he knows which he would choose.

“The tower,” he says. _For the poetry of it all,_ he adds, but not aloud. Maybe not a logical way to make a choice — but Julian is a mad Cat, emotions bubbling just under the surface, perpetually a whisker’s breadth from overflow, and Jaskier is — was — a lovelorn bard, following the whims of his heart on a wild goose chase around the continent for twenty long years.

He has never made logical choices. Still, they have rarely led him astray.

“Then we’ll try the tower. But we need a way in.” Her voice is slow, halting. “My magic... I have just enough to manage a portal, I think. But just one. I can’t portal you in and out again. Not with any accuracy, and not without draining myself too much to be able to make a third portal to safety.”

When Julian grins, he tastes night air and the smell of smoke through his bared teeth. “Not to worry. I’ve got that part covered. Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

Julian scales the ramparts under cover of shadow, lying in wait just under the lip of stone. There he stays, until a patrolling soldier, armed only with a crossbow, comes close enough to strike. The soldier does not even have time to cry out; it is a brief and silent scuffle. The keep is so extensively overstaffed that nobody notices when one patrolman goes missing, vanishing in the space between one step and the next.

* * *

“This plan is insane, Jaskier,” Yennefer tells him, handing him the note.

“Of course it’s insane. I have a reputation to maintain, Yennefer,” he replies brightly.

“But — a _zipline?_ Really?”

“Just be glad it’s not a tightrope.”

His merriment rapidly fades as he reads the note, replaced by an unhappy jut to his lower lip. She has no idea why; she wrote it herself and she thinks it is suitably concise. But when he takes the pen from her hands, he ignores the message, and instead begins to frantically scribble out their names. There is something frenzied about him as he does it, the quill nearly tearing through the paper as he scores the letters beyond legibility. Yennefer watches in silence as he replaces their signature with the vague, unspecific “ _YOUR FRIENDS_ ”. She does not comment on it.

The paper was ripped from one of his old notebooks, the ones he had used to scrawl song lyrics into as he composed. She is surprised he still carries it with him when his lute and his brightly-coloured clothing is gone. But, she does not comment on it.

His aim is impeccable; the arrow to which the note is attached soars between the bars of the window a hundred feet in the air without a hitch. Working with a brisk focus she has never before seen in him, he knots the rope to the second arrow, testing the weight of it in his hands.

Then, he pauses.

He turns back to where his potion-bag is propped against a tree, and crouches to rummage through the bottles with a gentle clinking. When he turns back around, his eyes are blue. His scars are gone. He is still armed to the teeth, and dressed in black — but all his sharp edges have been sanded away to leave a round-faced bard with big eyes and a quick smile. He tucks the medallion under his armour, away and out of sight.

Yennefer opens her mouth to say something — but comes up short. 

Without acknowledging the change, without acknowledging that he has slipped back into an old and ill-fitting glamour, Jaskier raises the crossbow, takes aim, and lets the arrow loose. The end of the rope disappears through the tower window; the tail is still gathered at their feet, with plenty of length to spare. He hands it to her.

“Secure that to a high, sturdy branch,” he orders. “Try not to make the trajectory too steep. The princess of Cintra isn’t very much older than twelve, and the rope will only support one person at a time, so she’ll have to come down alone.”

Yennefer is caught in his blue gaze. She doesn’t want to comment on it — on the glamour, on the scored-out names on the note, on the lyric notebook he kept, on the way his fingers twitch restlessly at his side — but she feels she must. “Jaskier…”

“It’s Julian,” he interrupts, quieter than she expects, absently twisting the ring on his middle finger. “My real name. It’s Julian.”

Then, without another word, he’s gone. His shadow darts toward the place where the tower meets the wall, and like a cat, begins to climb. 

* * *

Geralt often thinks that he should get rid of the broken lute.

After spotting it at the bottom of the ravine, the polished wood splintered and the once-taut strings curling where they snapped, Geralt knows that something terrible must have happened. Jaskier would give up a leg before he would give up that lute. He can’t name the emotion that has him carefully climbing to the bottom of the gorge, boots kicking out dust beneath him, jaw locked, shock and dread mingling to reel him away from himself and into a glassy, mindless automatism. He fetches the broken lute without stopping to think about it.

The pieces still fit in the case; he fastens it shut with a belt.

There is no body, no sign of a struggle. Geralt searches the mountain for days without spotting so much as a footprint. He cannot think of a single reason why Jaskier would let his most precious possession fall, or why he would leave it behind him. He must be dead — there is simply no other explanation that makes sense.

Everywhere he goes, he asks after Jaskier — every inn, every city, even stopping fellow travellers on the road to ask if they’ve seen him. Hope only hurts him in the end, so he soon gives up. Not that he had ever been the biggest fan of Jaskier’s singing, but somehow, every other bard he hears now sounds grating and discordant in his ears, wrong in a way that’s hard to define, and even harder to voice. He carries the broken lute with him everywhere he goes, like some sort of twisted talisman, as if it will draw Jaskier back like a dragon drawn to gold.

After a month has passed with no word of Jaskier, Geralt forces himself to accept the truth. His friend is dead; he will never see him again. It pains him deeper than he ever would admit, pains him in a way almost too big to stuff down, to swallow, in a way that is almost too heavy to bear — but he has to give up. Let it go. Humans die, and Jaskier was no exception; Geralt should have been expecting it. He’d be best served by forgetting him, by leaving even the memory of him behind.

Yet, Geralt still carries the broken lute.

* * *

The rope begins to move not long after it makes its grand entrance, trailing along the floor with a rattle, the arrow still attached. Whoever is at the other end is clearly doing something with it. Remembering the scribbled order in the note, Geralt quickly stands on the end of the rope to hold it in place, sharing a bemused look with Ciri. He is still keeping his weight off his bad leg, though the swelling has gone down.

“Maybe they mean for us to climb?” she suggests, but he shakes his head.

“Our hands are still bound, and even if we managed to get through the window, we’d be spotted,” he says, tightly. “A monkey could hardly do it. And my leg…”

She doesn’t have time to reply, because there is a strange scuffling sound from just outside the window. A hand appears first, scrabbling for hold against the window-frame. The rest of him is quick to follow: a man dressed in black armour, hoisting himself fluidly up to crouch precariously on the ledge, hooking one arm securely around the bars to hold himself fast. He has dark hair, and wears an expression of immense concentration, the pink tip of his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth. This expression breaks as he waves at them with his one free hand.

“Hi Geralt,” he says, sounding a little — distracted? Discomfited? “And Princess Cirilla, of course — gods, haven’t you grown!” Immediately, without looking much at either of them, he slips a needle-thin knife out of his boot and expertly begins to pick the lock on the window.

Geralt's face has gone paler than his hair. “ _Jaskier?”_

“I’ll explain everything in a moment,” the man says, without looking up from his task, “I promise. Just as soon as I — bollocks!”

The window suddenly swings open on its hinges, and he swings with it; he catches himself easily, and lands nimbly on his feet. “That was quicker than expected. Well, let me secure that rope; I’m afraid Yennefer and I didn’t account for the fact your hands are bound.”

Brimming with nervous energy, the black-clad man — Jaskier, Ciri supposes, but the only Jaskier she’s ever heard of was a kooky bard who played in Cintra’s court on occasion — tugs at the rope that is still held fast beneath Geralt’s boot. Geralt doesn’t move. He looks terrifying. Ciri knows, objectively, that he _is_ terrifying — square jaw and livid eyes, hulking where he stands — but this is the first time she thinks she has ever seen it for herself. The gentle man who had apologised for tugging on her hair when he had undone the knot of the gag is gone. It is like sharing a cage with a tiger. Fury rolls off him in waves; the tower room feels airless with it.

“I thought you were _dead,”_ he all but spits.

“And I thought you hated me!” Jaskier replies, voice shrill. “Now, if you haven’t noticed, we are on something of a time limit here before those wrinkly-armoured buffoons realise there is a slapdash jailbreak occurring right underneath their noses, so if you would _please_ lift your blasted foot and let me tie this godsdamned rope, Geralt, that would be marvellously helpful.”

Still bristling, Geralt steps back. Jaskier moves with a speed and finesse that nearly makes Ciri dizzy; he has tied the rope securely to the bars of the door in seconds.

“Now, who’s first?” he asks, holding up the lockpick.

Geralt is still glaring. “What—” he begins to say, before cutting himself off, jaw working furiously.

“This is the part where we escape, Geralt,” Jaskier offers, helpfully. “Unless you would rather stay here in this very lovely tower? I won’t force you, though I can’t say that three score of Nilfgaard’s craziest crusaders will make very good company.”

“Ciri first,” Geralt bites out.

“ _Gladly,”_ says Jaskier, with a roll of his eyes. Ciri turns to give him access to the cuffs that kept her hands bound, and is surprised at how quickly he opens them. She shakes her wrists loose with a hiss; there is going to be an ache in her shoulders for _days._

“Where did a bard learn to pick locks like that?” she asks.

“Or scale a _hundred-foot tower?”_ Geralt growls.

“Oh, here and there,” says Jaskier, still bustling about, undoing the buckle on the belt that crosses his chest and handing it to Ciri. She just stares down at it, at a loss. Her shoulders are still sore and stiff, every movement of her hands sending jagged spikes of pain down either arm to fizz out in the region of her wrists.

“What are you doing?” Geralt demands.

The rope Jaskier secured to the door has gone taut as whoever on the other end has tied it; he gives it an experimental tug, but it holds. “Escaping. Now, Princess Cirilla,” he says, squeezing her fingers where they hold onto the belt, “I’m going to need you to hook this belt over the rope, wrap the ends around both hands, jump out the window, and scoot along the rope while holding on for dear life. A very lovely sorceress named Yennefer is waiting on the other end to portal us all to safety — all you need to do is get there in one piece. Alright?”

Ciri feels her eyes nearly bug out of her head at the concept. But Geralt does not object. He looks about an inch from spontaneous combustion, a vein popping in his temple — but he does not tell her not to go.

“Alright,” she echoes, faintly.

“Good girl.” Jaskier helps her secure the belt over the rope, and winds the ends of it around her hands and wrists so tightly it hurts. Then, he hoists her onto the window ledge.

The end of the rope disappears into darkness. It is a very long drop to the ground.

“Three pieces of advice,” says Jaskier. “One — don’t look down. Two — don’t let go. Three — have fun!”

Then he is giving her a gentle nudge, and she is flying; rushing through the dark, the wind squeezing tears from her eyes and whipping her hair out in a stream of silver behind her.

* * *

“That’s the conclusion? They just let us go, and you give all of Nettly’s coin to the elves?”

Geralt rolls his eyes so hard in his head he’s surprised they don’t get stuck. He’s fairly sure he’s been bitten by leeches less annoying than this blue-clad bard, chattering incessantly at his side. Not even several blows to the head has been enough to dissuade him from his endless propensity for inane conversation. Geralt wonders if just one more punch might finally do the trick.

“Filavandrel’s lute not gift enough for you?” he sighs.

Jaskier’s grin is dreamy as he fingers the neck of the instrument. “Mm, she is bit sexy, isn’t she?”

Geralt just tightens his grin on Roach’s reins, watching her head bob gently before him — quiet, calm, blessedly _mute_ Roach. In a travel companion, he’s never wanted for more.

“I do have respect for Filavandrel,” Jaskier says, voice a little quieter where it echoes over to him. “He survived the Great Cleansing once. Who knows? Maybe he can do it again.” Then, quieter still: “Be reborn.”

If Geralt had cared enough to pay attention, he might have noted the distant look in Jaskier’s eyes as he speaks, or the rueful turn to his mouth. His fingers fall slack on the neck of the lute, as though his thoughts are carrying him away. But Geralt does not notice, and the moment passes, there and gone in a blink.

And then, as if Geralt hasn’t suffered enough, the bloody bard starts singing.

* * *

Jaskier watches Ciri disappear into the dark, shoulders hunched beneath the armour, mouth flattened into a thin line. Geralt’s sprained ankle still twinges, but he ignores it as he steps forward to crowd into Jaskier’s space, to glare at him.

“You might want to wait until I get your hands free to threaten me, Geralt,” Jaskier says, with an air of dull resignation. “I meant it — those soldiers are going to notice the rope leading from their prison tower straight into the woods any minute now.”

Without waiting for an answer, he sidesteps Geralt to quickly move behind him, his string-calloused fingers brushing against Geralt’s own as he begins to work on picking the cuffs.

“Where did you go?” Geralt says, staring resolutely at the seams of the stone wall. Damp gathers in some of the cracks, glistening in the low light. “I thought you were dead, Jaskier. For months. I looked for you.”

“I can be hard to find.”

Geralt closes his eyes. Joy is at war with fury — because Jaskier had lied, Jaskier had let him think him dead for months on end — he had grieved him, grieved him more than he had grieved anyone else in his long, long life — and Jaskier had been fine all along. Alive and well and busy learning how to pick locks and climb the sheer sides of stone towers as easy as a spider.

But he’s alive. He’s alive, and Geralt could forgo the zipwire rope and soar with the relief of that alone.

Jaskier stands very close behind him. Geralt hears him sigh, then feels the press of a foreign object into his palm. Jaskier closes his hand around it like it is a gift, and Geralt recognises the curve of the still-warm metal.

“Why are you giving me a ring, Jaskier?”

“Oh, come on, don’t say it like _that —_ it is a very different kind of ring, but I still take great offence at what you’re implying — but, anyway, this isn’t about the ring, Geralt. It’s…” Jaskier pauses, his breath warm on the back of Geralt’s neck, before resuming working on picking the lock. “It’s about what the ring does. There was a glamour on it, and I—”

The shackles come undone with a click. Jaskier falls silent. Geralt can hear him take a step back, can hear the rustle of his armour as he reaches under it for something, can hear the clink of jewellery, can hear the—

Slow beat of his heart. Too slow. Four times slower than it should be.

Geralt turns around.

The first thing he notices is the eyes; impossible as they are to miss. Greenish-yellow, a strange colour even for a witcher. The smell of horsehair and leather oil and the faintest whiff of chemicals; a scent Geralt knows intimately. The scar on his cheek, and his temple. The medallion on his chest, the cat’s face forever fixed in a snarl.

Jaskier smiles — a dull, hollow thing. “Julian of Kerack, at your service.”

Jaskier is a witcher. It explains the agelessness, Geralt supposes, but very little else. How could he not have noticed, in twenty long years? How could he never have seen it? How could Jaskier have kept up the façade, have never given anyone cause for doubt, have not once slipped up in his incessant stream of chatter and given the game away?

How could Jaskier _lie_ to him?

A dark, dry part of him that sounds an awful lot like Vesemir remarks: _he’s a Cat — he was born to lie._

Jaskier’s eerie eyes are wide, almost vulnerable, mouth parted as though he wants to say something else — but nothing comes. 

Then, Geralt is saved from having to fashion a response out of the jumbled soup of his thoughts by the cry of alarm that sounds up from underneath them.

They’ve been spotted.

“Quick,” Jaskier hisses, all business once again as he unhooks another belt from his chest and shoves it into Geralt’s hands. Forcefully, he pushes him towards the window. “They’ve got crossbows, so curl up as tight as you can. Hurry!”

Geralt has always been accomplished at compartmentalising in a crisis. Slipping the belt over the rope and winding it securely over his hands, he makes for the window. It occurs to him briefly to make Jaskier go first — an old instinct, ill-suppressed. Jaskier is the witcher dressed head-to-toe in armour. Jaskier doesn't need Geralt looking out for him now.

“One thing, before you go,” Jaskier says, as Geralt hunches on the window-ledge. He grabs one of the swords strapped to his back, still sheathed, and folds the ends of Geralt’s fingers over it, just like he had with the ring. “Just in case Yennefer can't get you out in time.”

Geralt still can’t untangle his thoughts enough to say anything. Jaskier’s hands remain on his for just a beat too long.

Then, he abruptly shoves Geralt out of the window.

* * *

Yennefer hears the cry of alarm go up moments before Geralt’s dark shadow descends from the tower. She urges Pegasus forward, the princess trembling against her. The vestiges of her magic crackle. She hasn’t very much left — but it will have to do. It will have to be enough.

As soon as the girl, Ciri, had landed, crumpling weakly to the ground at the end of her and Jaskier’s impromptu zipwire, Yennefer had set her onto the back of Jaskier’s grey gelding, and climbed up behind her, ready at any moment to portal out of there. She just needs Geralt and Jaskier to _hurry._

Geralt’s face when he lands is unsurprisingly livid. “Did you know?” he demands, without so much as a greeting, unsheathing what looks like one of Jaskier’s swords. “Did you know who he was?”

“Oh, hello to you too, Geralt,” Yennefer snaps from behind Ciri. “And I didn’t. Of course I bloody didn't.” She shifts her weight a little to the side, holding out her hands to ready the portal, dragging up all the unwilling dregs of her magic to the forefront of her skin, to fizz in her fingertips, waiting to be unleashed the minute Jaskier lands.

Geralt scrubs his hand over his face, and turns back to the tower, just as one of the Nilfgaardian soldiers rounds the corner into the clearing, sword raised.

With the growl of an enraged animal, Geralt lunges, his slight limp making him no less lethal, teeth bared and blade flashing. He cuts the first soldier down only for another three to arrive in his place. Pegasus nickers in alarm, rearing nervously back from the fray, Ciri’s grip on his reins white-knuckled, her eyes wide. Geralt is so busy with two of the soldiers that he does not see the third flanking him, does not see the the glint of the raised blade—

 _“Geralt!”_ Yennefer screams — because while she’s still angry at him — she’s furious with him, for taking away her choice, for lying to her — but she is metres away, she is sat uselessly on Pegasus’ back, a portal ready between her palms — and she doesn’t want him to die.

The soldier draws in a gasp, and a gurgle. A knife is embedded in his throat; he topples, boneless, to the ground.

A shadow with yellow eyes, that’s all Jaskier is now. He drops from the tree with daggers already flying, three of the soldiers falling to their knees and crumpling. He takes down two more with a swing of his other sword, covering all of Geralt’s blind spots with a deadly precision born out of decades of practice.

There are more, there are always more — what feels like the entire Nilfgaardian army pouring out of the keep as ants from a kicked anthill, swarming through the woods, surrounding them.

“Now, Yenn!” she hears Geralt yell over the clang of metal meeting metal.

Yennefer lets the portal loose, and Ciri gives Pegasus a kick, and together they hurtle through the gap, between the zap and static-hiss of energy. Pegasus gamely keeps his feet, wheeling around to face the portal where it still crackles, splitting open the night.

Geralt and Jaskier do not follow.

Yennefer’s bones ache with the effort of maintaining the portal, her stomach tensed into a rigid knot, all the breath crushed out of her with the effort. She can’t keep it up — she won’t be able to keep it up — it’s going to close, to close without them — she has left them behind —

Then, just as the magic begins to split, to shatter, two crumpled figures collapse through, landing hard on the ground.

The portal snaps shut, and Yennefer slips from Pegasus’ saddle to land in a heap, all of her energy sucked dry. They did it — they’re in the garden of one of her safe houses, fragrant with the smell of late summer’s blossoms, a chorus of cicadas chirping in the night.

She is relieved only for a moment.

“Jaskier!” Geralt grunts. Jaskier is writhing where Geralt has him pinned to the ground, his fist straining where it grips Jaskier’s wrist, barely managing to hold the knife he’s swung at Geralt’s neck at bay. “Jaskier — it’s _me!”_

Yennefer collapses, stumbling forward and crawling to them where they still remain locked in a struggle on the ground. “Geralt, he’s bleeding — Geralt—”

The madness that swept Jaskier dissipates just as abruptly as it had arrived. The knife falls from his hand and his body goes slack underneath Geralt, head bumping limply against the grass, face white as chalk. 

“I’m sorry — I’m sorry,” he gasps out, gasps out like he can hardly breathe.

Yennefer realises that he can't.

“Got lost— frenzy— not mad— I’m not mad—” Jaskier is still babbling, but Yennefer ignores him in favour of staring at the arrow shaft that protrudes from his chest.

The arrow is from a crossbow; it pierced the dark leather of his gambeson with ease. By the position, she would say that it hit his lung — maybe even his heart. There is a wet sound to his rapid breaths. Blood reddens his lips.

Geralt draws back as if slapped. “Gods, _Jaskier—”_ His hands hover uselessly over the arrow shaft, and Yennefer can almost see the gears in his head turn — pulling it out now will do him no good, will only make him bleed out faster — but leaving the arrow where it is will kill him. He glances up at Yennefer and Ciri, face stricken and pleading, as if they might to be able to do something. Yen doesn’t think she’s seen him look so helpless since she confronted him on the mountain.

Yennefer just shakes her head, legs folded beneath her on the ground, Jaskier’s cloak heavy on her shoulders. Ciri slides off Pegasus’ back, her hand over her mouth.

“Won’t die,” Jaskier wheezes. With a bloodied hand, he grabs Geralt by the wrist. “Didn’t tell you—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Geralt says, cupping Jaskier’s face, his voice thick. “Gods, Jaskier — you’re dying, that doesn't matter now. None of that matters.”

And then, in the midst of his death-throes, Jaskier manages to _roll his eyes._ “Not _that,”_ he says, gurgling a little. “I— listen to me— I don't— I can’t—” He is cut off by a wet cough, his face crumpling in agony. Geralt is still straddling him, holding his face steady between his hands, as if he’s frightened to let go.

Jaskier draws in another shallow breath, his bloodied hand wrapped around Geralt’s wrist, brow furrowed and eyes emphatic, as though what he is trying to say is very, very important.

“Two— hours—” he manages, in a garbled voice. “Please—”

Then, the last of life leaves him with one final strangled gasp.

* * *

Yennefer forbids him from digging a grave in the garden that night.

“You’ve spent the last two days in a cell, Geralt,” she says, sharp, setting a mug of tea on the table before him. “Your leg is still paining you. You can rest for a single evening; I’m sure Jaskier wouldn’t have begrudged you that.”

Geralt can’t bring himself to answer her. He holds the mug between his hands, still stained red with Jaskier’s blood, but does not drink.

Yennefer’s voice when she turns to Ciri has much less bite. “You, too. Drink up. We’ll be safe here for a while.”

Ciri has hardly spoken a word since Jaskier died; Geralt worries absently that she’s spending more time in his taciturn company than is good for her. She would have liked Jaskier, he thinks, if she had the chance to know him — to properly know him, beyond a couple of words exchanged in the middle of their slapdash jailbreak.

Then again, Geralt thinks, bitterly, did anyone truly _know_ Jaskier at all?

Yennfer’s safe house is a heavily warded, one-room cottage, small and simple while still being cosy and well-furnished, with an extensive herb garden. It will do in the time it’ll take for Ciri to recover. Yen, too, looks like she needs the rest, and Geralt is keen to find out what happened at Sodden Hill as soon as he finds the will to speak. 

Jaskier’s body is wrapped in the black cloak Yen had been wearing. Geralt had laid him carefully out on a low bench in the corner. Yennefer had closed his eyes, but left his face uncovered. He looks even younger in death, his skin smooth and pale underneath the scars. It is all Geralt can do to remind himself that Jaskier isn't — _wasn’t_ — young, that Jaskier was probably just as old as he is. That Jaskier was not, in fact, named _Jaskier_ at all.

He can’t bring himself to anger over it. He just feels — wrung-out. Tired, but with no desire to sleep. Restless, but with no desire to move. It shouldn’t be so hard to mourn Jaskier now, when he’d done it all already months ago. It might be easier to be angry, and maybe he will be angry, once the shock has faded, but right now, he feels nothing much at all.

There is the faintest hum in Geralt’s medallion — which is odd, he thinks, because Yennefer had heated the water with the fire in the hearth.

Then, a terrible wheeze from the corner.

Geralt is on his feet in an instant. Ciri spills her tea with fright.

Jaskier tumbles gracelessly from the bench, still tangled up in the cloak, and promptly begins to cough up mouthfuls of blood onto Yennefer’s lovely wooden floor. Still choking on his own breath, he holds up a hand as if to say: _just give me a minute._

“He’s alive?” Ciri whispers.

Geralt does not faint, but he hasn’t eaten in two days, and it is a very near-thing. “What the _fuck,_ Jaskier?”

“Tried to tell you,” Jaskier rasps, wiping a string of dark blood away from his mouth with the back of his hand. “Usually takes about two hours — sometimes more, sometimes less. But I can’t be killed. I can't die.”

“You can’t die,” Geralt repeats, incredulous.

“Yes, and believe me, Geralt, many, many people have tried.” Still sitting on the floor, he looks up at the three of them, all staring at him in various states of shock. “Sorry for scaring you. I did _try_ to explain before I went, but I had the impression nobody got the message.”

“How?” Yennefer finally manages.

“I was a cursed child,” Jaskier says, untangling himself from the cloak. “At least, I think so. A maid told me something or other about a torn-up faery ring, but I can’t recall the details.” 

When he gets to his feet, he sways — Geralt reaches out and catches him on instinct. His skin is still a little cold to the touch, but blood pulses beneath it, and his breath comes freely in his whole, healed lungs. He blinks hard, his eyes ringed by dark shadows and his face a little wan, but is unmistakably, impossibly _alive._

“It was how I survived the Witcher Tournament,” he adds, as Geralt helps him sit on the bench. “And the massacre at the Caravan. And before that, the Cull. They used to say I had nine lives. Get it? The cat with nine lives? Not that anyone ever really believed it, though, and of course I never told anyone.” He looks up at them. “You won’t, will you? Tell anyone?”

“Of course not,” says Ciri, firmly. “You saved our lives. We owe you that much.”

“Do we?” Geralt grits out. He moves back to the table. The weight of the past few days suddenly comes crashing down on him; he has never felt so exhausted. “Anything else to admit to us, Jaskier?”

“What do you mean?”

“He means, do you have any other shocking secrets you want to get off your chest, now that we’re here?” Yennefer says. She has kept her composure very well, Geralt thinks — not that he expected anything less of her.

Jaskier pulls a face. “Not really, no,” he says. “Oh! I did see you two having sex once. The day we met, actually, after that whole ordeal with the djinn. It seemed awkward to mention it.”

“Gross,” says Ciri, before fetching a dishcloth to mop up her spilled tea.

* * *

Julian leaves two days later, in the dead of night. He’s good, of course, but not _that_ good; Geralt hears him sneak out, creeping on silent steps past the still-sleeping girls. He saddles up Pegasus and leads him to the edge of the safe house's wards, but pauses by the garden gate, pauses for long enough to look out over the silver-swept fields of their sanctuary.

“Where are you going to go?” Geralt asks.

Jaskier might have clutched at his chest in shock, would have berated Geralt for sneaking up on him like that, would have griped and grumbled and groaned. Julian does none of those things. Instead, he just shrugs without turning to look at Geralt, tilting his head a little contemplatively to one side.

“Not sure,” he admits. “Might wander for a while. Maybe take a few contracts, do some witchering. You know how it goes.” 

“Why won't you come with us?”

Julian closes his eyes. “I’ll drop in, of course, and if you need any help with anything, I’d be happy to lend a hand. I have two, after all.”

Geralt just inclines his head, waiting for him to finish. 

“But I can’t stay. You’re going to Kaer Morhen. I’m barred. I won’t be allowed in.”

“If I recall correctly,” Geralt says, dryly, “you’re barred from lots of places. It’s never stopped you before.”

Julian cracks a grin at the reminder, eyes opening just enough to fix Geralt with a half-lidded gaze. “Yeah, well, none of those places were occupied solely by a horde of angry witchers, were they?”

“Hm.” Geralt waits for Julian to fill the silence that follows. Jaskier would have, on account of the fact he couldn’t abide peace and quiet — and Geralt thinks that despite it all, Julian isn’t all that different from the man he pretended to be for twenty years. There is no way he could have pulled it off otherwise.

“I don’t think I’m ready,” he admits, proving Geralt right. “You hurt me and I hurt you. I was Jaskier for so long that I forgot what it meant to be Julian — deliberately. I still feel out-of-sorts in this skin, you know. Like none of the pieces fit the way they used to. And to go back to travelling with you… It wouldn’t be the same, because I’m not the same, and you’re not the same. And I don’t know if I could stand it.”

Geralt wants to stop him — to put a hand on his shoulder and tug him back — but it feels like there are too many things unsaid and too many things undone between them that crossing that divide will prove impossible. That he would be foolish even to try. Julian’s hair is tossed a little by the breeze, and his expression — that of someone faced with an unpleasant task — is achingly familiar, even if the last time Geralt had seen it was when Jaskier insisted upon washing kikmore guts out of his hair.

“You don’t want to do it.”

“I don’t much like being alone,” Julian agrees. “But I suppose I need to be. For a while, at least. Until I get,” he waves a hand in the general direction of his own head, “all this sorted out. Too many people running around up here.”

“Hm. And one of you is more than enough.”

“There is no need to be rude, Geralt,” Julian says. His mouth twists a little. “I am sorry, you know. For lying to you. I had never meant for it to go on so long.”

Geralt doesn’t ask why Julian had let it go on so long anyway. He thinks, maybe, he understands. It was easy, what they had, when Jaskier wasn’t landing the both of them in hot water. Companionable, in a very irritating way. Like making friends with one's hair-lice.

Julian raises his eyebrows. “Geralt, now is the part where _you_ apologise to _me._ For saying some very nasty and at least partially uncalled-for things on that mountain, in case you have somehow forgotten.”

“Hm,” says Geralt, just to piss him off.

Julian pulls such an affronted face that Geralt’s composure slips. He tugs him forward, and into a brief hug — the smell of horsehair, and chemicals, and perhaps, underneath that, ink and chamomile and woodsmoke. Music in the woods.

“I’m sorry,” he says, into Julian’s ear, and he means it.

When he pulls back, something in Julian’s expression has softened. His eyes are drastically different to the blue Geralt is used to — but the wide-eyed look to them is the same.

“Take care of yourself, Jaskier. And do come back soon.”

Julian grins as he mounts Pegasus, and turns him away from the gate. “Haven’t you learned by now, Geralt,” he calls back, “that I am _literally_ impossible to get rid of?”

Geralt watches as he takes off at a plodding pace down the road, still chuckling at his own joke.

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end (for now!)
> 
> I'm sorry for leaving Geralt and Jaskier's relationship ambiguous and only half-resolved — it felt unnatural to force them into a happy ending too soon after so much hurt. I am, however, writing a sequel which will deal much more overtly with them repairing their relationship. Hopefully I'll get the first part of that up soon, but I don't want to make any promises (I started writing this on Tuesday... 6 days and 24k later and I feel like a crazy person ... maybe not a momentum I can sustain...)
> 
> I really can't thank every who has read this / left kudos / commented enough!! Was just writing it as a self-indulgent exploration of my favourite tropes, and did not expect such an insanely kind response at all! It really means the world to me, and I hope you enjoyed it, and that wherever you are you can stay safe <3


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